Art History

ISSN 0141-6790 Vol. 22

No. 3

September 1999

pp. 421435

`Why should we be always looking back?' `Christian art' in nineteenth-century historiography in Britain
Adele M. Ernstrom
Reflecting on changes in mentality separating the contemporary 1870s from the world half a century earlier, George Eliot's narrative voice in Middlemarch observes that `Travellers did not [then] often carry full information on Christian art either in their heads or their pockets.'1 `Christian art' as a category with supporting literature is a liminal marker between the present and that near yet distant time when `even the most brilliant English critic of the day' could mistake the `flower-flushed tomb of the ascended Virgin for an ornamental vase due to the painter's fancy'.2 She here refers to William Hazlitt's praise in 1826 of Raphael's Coronation of the Virgin (plate 37), distinguishing its lower register where the apostles are grouped at the Madonna's tomb, Thomas in the centre, for its `wonderous emanation of sentiment in the crowd below near the vase of flowers'.3 By the time Middlemarch was published in 18712, Anna Jameson's Legends of the Madonna (1852) had interpreted images of the Virgin as shaped by apocryphal traditions like that of the sceptical Thomas who, desiring the Madonna's tomb to be opened, found it filled with lilies and roses.4 The literature on Christian symbolism for which Jameson's text implicitly stands in Middlemarch effectively dismissed as obsolete the kind of reading offered by Hazlitt. It is with rather an Olympian sweep that George Eliot indicates the cognitive distance between Hazlitt's 1826 Notes of a Journey through France and Italy and the mid-century context of Legends of the Madonna. For art historians, though, the interval deserves a closer look. By what logic or through what process of contestation did the term `Christian art' accede to a position of familiarity that a novelist could assume? Here it should be clarified that historically specific reference to `early Christian' art or artists, as in W.Y. Ottley's Italian School of Design (1823) is not at issue; considered instead is the coming into usage of `Christian art' as a determining rubric understood as coterminous with Christian faith. What was the relation of this category to pre-existing, or overlapping, discourses organizing the knowledge of art? What may have been its epistemological grounding? Its ideological implications? What resistances may have been mobilized to the study of art history in this sense? The concept of Christian inspiration as a determining force in architectural history and, by extension, all branches of the fine arts was introduced into English criticism in 1836 by A.W.N. Pugin's Contrasts: or, a parallel between the noble edifices of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and similar buildings of the
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present day; shewing the present decay of taste (plate 38). By what he subsequently termed `Christian architecture', Pugin understood Gothic building as characterized by `principles which influenced ancient compositions, and the soul which appears in all the former works . . .'.5 These principles involved respect for the `locality, destination . . . [and] character of a building'.6 Pugin flagged the importance of designating such architecture as `Christian' in the second edition of his book in 1841, stating that when Contrasts first appeared, `the very name of Christian art was almost unknown.'7 His sense of the inauguration in meaning this entailed was elaborated in his announcement of other reversals: the ages called dark in reality excelled in wisdom; art ceased when it supposedly revived; what is called superstition is piety; properly understood, bigotry is faith.8 In identifying (late) Gothic or `Christian' architecture as a coherent expression of its epoch, Pugin implicitly drew on the Saint-Simonian concept that great art was possible only in `organic' periods of history, periods unified by a compelling religious idea. Published in Paris in 1831, the Doctrine de Saint-Simon in its theory of history viewed the Christian Middle Ages as the most recent instance of an `organic' society. Pugin mobilized this idea in arguing for the legitimacy of medieval architecture and for its aesthetic and social function in a community of belief.9 To the same source Pugin was indebted directly or indirectly in characterizing the nineteenth century as an age that had rejected an earlier faith without replacing it by a new one; it was in just this sense that Saint-Simonianism defined the present as a `critical' age. Contrasts gave Saint-Simonian historicism a novel and telling application in juxtaposing the richness of Gothic architecture, suggested by Pugin's densely fretted etching style in such prints as that of the fifteenth-century St George's Chapel, Windsor, beside the mechanically ruled representation of architectural surfaces in what he considered the theatrical profanity of the Chapel Royal, Brighton (plate 39). Pugin parted ways, however, with the Saint-Simonian judgement that even in its finest hour Christianity had achieved but an imperfect and incomplete expression. The censure he would deliver in 1841 of mechanics' institutes as devices `to poison the minds of the operatives with infidel and radical doctrines'10 indeed marks his remove from any progressive vision of social or spiritual regeneration. All that might be wished, though he dared not hope for it in the year Contrasts appeared, was restoration of `the same feelings which influenced the old designers in the composition of their Works'.11 He thus seems to have prepared a later appeal to revival in The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture, the text of two lectures he delivered in 1841 at the Roman Catholic school and seminary, St Mary's College, Oscott, and in other publications. Unlike feelings he only hoped for, principles inextricably identified with Gothic forms could be elaborated and affirmed. Embracing all the arts related to architecture, the formula `Christian art' served as catalyst in conjunction with Pugin's graphic argument in outlining what would become a call to architectural and, by extension, social and religious return. But `Christian art' was also potent in reorienting art history and criticism, concerns tangential to his project. Taken seriously as an historical conundrum, the stakes implicated in the introduction of `Christian art' should yield somewhat different results from approaches in which the `primitives' are found to have been `rediscovered'. Linked with concepts of 422
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37 Raphael, The Coronation of the Virgin, c. 1503, oil on canvas (transferred from panel), Vatican Museums, Rome.

restoration and revival, `rediscovery' implies a return while normalizing the idea of cyclicity. Historiographically, `rediscovery' is grounded in notions of the rise and fall of empires that were applied to art history by Alexandre Lenoir in 1802: `The arts are subjected to revolutions just like empires: they successively pass from infancy to barbarism and return, little by little, to their starting point.'12 Advanced as an overarching principle of art history in the 1830s, `Christian art' is not accommodated by accounts that trace an incremental rise in taste for Gothic antiquities or for the `primitives,' a term applied to painting after `Gothic' gained prestige as a designation for architecture and sculpture in the nineteenth century.13 Nor can interest in the early schools be seen as coterminous, or equatable, with assertion of the primacy of Christian inspiration. In Germany national considerations took a leading part in positive claims for `early art' as in 1804 when Friedrich Schlegel called on connoisseurs who would
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38 A.W.N. Pugin, drawn and etched by, title page to Contrasts: or, a parallel between the noble edifices of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and similar buildings of the present day; shewing the present decay of taste, 1836, St Marie's Grange near Salisbury. Collection Centre Canadien d'Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montre al.

`seek to unite in one great body all the now-existing and widely-scattered compositions of the old German schools'.14 Formation of the Boissere e collection in Cologne was in part a response to Schlegel's appeal. Motivation of this kind scarcely operated in Britain where intermittent notice of `early art', understood as art before the end of the fifteenth century, was largely antiquarian in nature. Viewing the Boissere e pictures at Schleissheim near Munich in 1833 after their acquisition by Ludwig I, Anna Jameson began by acknowledging the `most flagrant violations of taste and costume' in these works, yet was `perfectly amazed' before panels by Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden; she was exceptionally sympathetic in praising their `simplicity and integrity of feeling' and the `elaborate marvellous beauty of the execution of the parts'.15 Her initial reservations were more representative of a prevailing revulsion in England against `rude' forms of pictorial art, a revulsion not activated by other objects of antiquarian interest that were valued simply because they were old. As late as 1858 it seemed suitable, or necessary, to defend purchase for the London National Gallery of Margaritone d'Arezzo's thirteenth-century Virgin and Child with Saints as illustrating `the barbarous state into which art had sunk even in Italy previously to its revival'.16 Here the argument is historical while embracing contradiction in antiquarian attitudes to `early art'. Discontinuity and incongruity in responses to the `primitives' challenge the rotational figure invoked in histories of taste. Against accounts in which the entelechy of an unfolding force leads to valuations 424
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39 A.W.N. Pugin, drawn and etched by, Contrasted Royal Chapels from Contrasts, 1836. Collection Centre Canadien d'Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montre al.

we hold today, I would distinguish in the emergence of `Christian art' what can be seen in Foucauldian terms as the punctuality of a `real event'.17 That punctuality contested the legacy of antiquarianism which, as Arnaldo Momigliano has shown, displayed remarkable tenacity through the nineteenth century.18 As an historical and supra-historical category, `Christian art' collided with antiquarian reliance on what could be inferred about a synchronically conceived topic from material remains. To such concerns the concept of a transcendent idea or spiritual force working itself out through the history of art could only be alien in its diachronic logic and in the narrative rhythms of its movement. Despite its claims to systematic collection of the relics of the past, antiquarianism was especially oriented to the pursuit of oddities. `Curiosities' was a cardinal rubric of this form of knowledge. Although, for example, the antiquarian James Bentham brought historical considerations to bear in his History and Antiquities of the Conventual and Cathedral Church of Ely, he justified his subject's interest not as a representative or epitomizing example of its class but as `one of the most curious Monuments of Ecclesiastical Antiquities in this Kingdom'.19 Collections of antiquities, not seldom augmented through destructive removal of fragments from medieval monuments, seem aligned less with a humanistic ideal of Antiquitates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than with cabinets of curiosity. In fixing on what was outside the norm, such collections betrayed a fascination with the grotesque or obtuse
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quiddity of their contents. Natural or historic relics sanctified by rarity, their acquisition was not in the first place motivated by textual concerns, as has been claimed;20 cognitive rationalization of such collections came after the fact. It was rather an epiphenomenon that cabinets of curiosity were haunted, paradoxically, by an idea of encyclopaedic finality. Both dimensions of the antiquarian tradition lent some support to the inclusion of works of `early art' frequently referred to as `curiosities' in the first half of the nineteenth century in museums so as to achieve historic inclusiveness (the fullness of the text). `Peculiarities' was a related heading, as in Elizabeth Rigby's reference in a Quarterly Review article of 1846 to `a taste for the peculiarities' of early German and Italian masters as characterizing the situation of the arts in Germany.21 `Stiff figures' in work of the Cologne school were seen by Elizabeth Rigby in an 1845 report to the Athenaeum as telling the viewer `in a language, addressed not to the organs of sense, but to the perception of the spirit, that they were conceived . . . at a period when Art offered no blandishments for the eye', but rather an idea that is `her highest aim and object'.22 A language not addressed to the organs of sense clearly affronted the vocabulary of connoisseurship, headed by the criteria `grace and greatness' in the formulation of Jonathan Richardson's essay on criticism.23 That such qualities were mediated by, if not solely addressed to, the eye was axiomatic in the tradition within which Richardson worked. Elizabeth Rigby does not align her defence of early Rhenish pictures with claims for `Christian art', but she approaches arguments advanced in that sense by stating that such paintings are addressed to the spirit. Paradoxically, her admission of sensual meagreness in the work she treats diverges sharply from the aesthetic richness Pugin celebrated in `Pointed' architecture. Both her apology and arguments for the merit of `early art' present the greatest possible remove from what Laurence Sterne called the `tormenting' discourse of connoisseurship.24 Such productions would make no demands on the baffled and resentful eye of Sterne's Everyman to discern and savour subtle qualities of beauty, since these were not held to be present in the art recommended. What would be claimed for it imposed no humiliation on the ignorant or insensible viewer. Like bitter physic (from a connoisseurial perspective), what came to be titled `Christian art' possessed virtues beyond the realm of sensual gratification, virtues of expression stemming from the devout simplicity of the artist's soul that served to redeem `mechanical' deficiencies. `Christian art' proposed the cancellation of an entire tradition erected on respect for artistic skill going back to antiquity and on ideals of beauty enshrined in academic theory. The possibility of a hearing for `Christian art' was grounded in closely connected political and religious crises that were precipitated in 1828 by repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts and, in the following year, by Catholic Emancipation. Dating from the reign of Charles II, the Test and Corporation Acts renewed earlier penal legislation against dissenters and Catholics. These measures had barred from municipal corporations all who refused the sacrament in the Church of England and excluded Catholics from public office by requirements that they swear allegiance to the Crown, receive sacraments in the Anglican Church and reject the doctrine of transsubstantiation. Cancelling legal privileges enjoyed by the Church of England posed fundamental questions for its 426
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status as a national church, questions sharply intensified by agitation for reform that denounced parallel abuses in the administration of church and state.25 Seen by many as all but apocalyptic in their portents, these changes impelled Anglican theologians to affirm the Church of England as a divine institution and its historical continuity within Christianity. Pronouncements on such points as the primitive doctrine of the Eucharist characterized the Oxford Movement from 1833, contributing indirectly to a context of reflection on the relation to art of Christian faith. Meanwhile Catholic renewal went forward in education and such initiatives as founding of the Dublin Review in 1836 to serve as organ of Catholic thought in Britain by Nicholas Wiseman, rector of the English College at Rome and later the first Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster (1850). Church building now became possible on a larger scale than was previously feasible, a `transition from chapel to church architecture amongst us', according to Wiseman,26 culminating within the first half of the nineteenth century in Pugin's St Chad's, Birmingham (completed 1844), the first Roman Catholic cathedral built in England since the Reformation. From 1839 the Cambridge Camden later Ecclesiological Society concerned itself with the correct use of `Christian' (Gothic) precedents in church design and furnishings.27 Following Pugin, the Ecclesiologists formed the one organized constituency in England in which `Christian art' in reference to church architecture and ornament was connected with models for restoration. The question presented itself somewhat differently in the figurative arts. However, a work treating `Christian art' as a determining category in that domain appeared in France in 1836, the year Contrasts was published. Widely read and reviewed in England, sie chre tienne . . . Forme de l'art.28 One of its this was A.F. Rio's De la Poe reviewers was John Steinmetz, Belgian correspondent for the Dublin Review, who reworked Rio's thesis after a less apodictic fashion in extended essays of 1842 for that journal, outlining a history of art grounded in Catholic philosophy.29 But Protestant writers in Britain who treated the subject Anna Jameson, John Ruskin, Lord Lindsay, among others also engaged in some sense with Rio's argument. One whose use of `Christian art' offered a precedent in English criticism avant la lettre, so to speak, was John Flaxman, whose Lectures on Sculpture were first published in 1829. He there speaks of the Emperor Constantine's patronage of `Christian decorations' for his new capital as laying `the foundation for a stock of Christian art . . . after the barbarous inundations from the north had subsided, and [as having] assisted in raising the fallen arts of Italy, until the mighty genius of Michael Angelo shone forth in the unrivalled Sistine Chapel . . .'.30 Clearly much broader than `early Christian', as in Ottley, the sweep of Flaxman's `Christian art' competes in some degree with the main headings in his synthesizing historical lectures 9 and 10: `Ancient Art' and `Modern Sculpture'. He strives to bring these categories into alignment, affirming that the `first beginning of modern art' should not be `absolutely reckoned from the commencement of the eleventh century', but rather `from the reign of Constantine'.31 Flaxman especially stresses the institutional authority of Christianity as the established religion of the empire. It is within this setting that Christianity qualifies the content of `modern' art, which is determined by art's severance from the service of pagan gods.
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Implicitly pertinent to contemporary debates on patronage,32 Flaxman's treatment of the presiding role of Constantine or of the church as patron does not engage the subject position of the artist at an intersection of personal desire and relation to a community of faith. No Christian afflatus emerges as the inner impulse of artistic creation, recalling W.H. Wackenroder's Outpourings from the Heart of an Art-loving Monk (1797) or the link Friedrich Schlegel drew in 180204 between Catholic devotion and `the contemplative philosophy' of artists in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.33 A notable step in the English context was however taken in that direction in Maria Callcott's Description of the Chapel of the Annunziata dell'Arena of 1835. Usually remarked for its precocious attention to Giotto, I would suggest that Callcott's text, accompanied by the first publication of prints after the cycle, was especially fertile in outlining a critical framework by which late medieval pictorial art could be assigned value.34 She interprets the Chapel as representative not of institutional patronage or of Giotto's individual gifts but `of the spirit of the early artists'. Their efficacy lay in their narrative power, which they deployed from motives of piety, using familiar `compositions' that would best instruct an illiterate public in the gospel and lives of the saints. Giotto shared this prevailing excellence of story-telling, joining to it `a very peculiar expression and grace'.35 Without speaking of `Christian art', Callcott's text on the Arena Chapel advances criteria that would be mobilized in the elevation of a category that linked the development of art with the course of history. Characterized by simplicity and devout belief, the artist's subjectivity inflected the point of a view of a community which it was dedicated to serve. In realizing a common purpose, artists harboured no thought of exploiting `the mere practical part of the art' for personal display or rivalry.36 Affirming the didactic role and public utility of art in a context free of competitive self-seeking, Callcott brought together historical appreciations and a retrodictive Utopian aspiration. Her outline of the context in which `early' artists worked evokes the portrayal by Saint-Simonian `missionaries' active in England from 1832 of a `communion of interest' prevailing in society before `competition and antagonism [became] . . . the moving springs of all private [i.e., commercial] affairs.'37 These Utopian adumbrations in Callcott's work shortly preceded Pugin's introduction of Christian inspiration in 1836 as the presiding principle for interpretation of architectural history and subsequently the reorientation of its practice. In defining `Pointed or Christian architecture' and its figurative adjuncts in 1841 as `the faith of Christianity embodied, and its practices illustrated' and in treating the lapse of faith as a corrigible moral failing that had enabled the assertion of state power over the church, Pugin held out the possibility of a return that he urgently advocated.38 His position is very strictly exemplified in the belief that churches built on Christian principles in the nineteenth century were not of the period of their construction but effectively restitutions of Gothic architecture.39 This hypostatized collapse of the present and the historical past through an architectural practice that underwrites recovery of Christian social harmony of the Middle Ages involves a central contradiction in its appeal to and denial of history. It is as though the interrogation of history yields the promise of its cancellation, the annulling of the past as past. 428
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William Dyce articulated a premise he held in common with Pugin that religion was a `predisposing and ruling course of the development of the arts' in an unpublished lecture of 1844 titled `Christian Art' and discussed by Lindsay Errington in an article in the Burlington in 1992.40 Dyce's periodization of an art e posits five phases that crest in an `Ascetic' stage three in history moralise fifteenth-century Italy when `Christian art' attained its highest excellence, subsiding through `PaganChristian' debasement to an abject fifth or `Sensual' phase characterized by `neglect of the ancient and approved types of sacred persons and things and the substitution of a comparatively vulgar and unspiritual imitation of nature'.41 Despite his view of religion's controlling influence over the arts, and the assumed possibility of its renewal, Dyce refrains from explicitly bending his scheme towards any approach to comprehensive revival of the practices of `early art'. Doctrinal considerations do not seem to me solely accountable for this reticence; rather aesthetic factors (to use a term Dyce contests in giving `sensual' a degraded meaning) militated against any easy dismissal of High Renaissance or seventeenth-century standards of skill, fluency and beauty. At the level of programmatic application, what was recuperable for Dyce and other students of `early' figurative art were particular resources of technique, in this instance a `prismatic theory of flesh painting' that Dyce believed he had identified in Perugino and his school.42 A similarly limited recuperation from another direction that I proposed in writing on Mary Philadelphia Merrifield for the Dictionary of Art was the Pre-Raphaelites' likely debt for their interest in a `wet ground' technique I would now suggest, in white grounds generally to the responsibility her publications of the 1840s ascribed to white grounds for the purity and beauty of colour in `ancient painting'. When grounds `were not of gold, they were invariably white', Merrifield affirmed in the preface to her edition of Cennino Cennini's Treatise on Painting.43 But if Dyce, Merrifield and other writers on `early art' carefully circumscribed what might properly be retrieved from historic practice, at another level Dyce's schematization of `Christian art' in stages of ascending realization, climax and decay suggested or implied the possibility of return. It did so by a narrative logic sie chre tienne, which may indeed have that it shared with A.-F. Rio's De la Poe encouraged Dyce's attention to Perugino, the `immortal' whom Rio called `le prince de l'art chre tien'.44 Rio's book traces a principle of necessity immanent in the history of art. According to his sympathetic reviewers, John Steinmetz and Nicholas Wiseman, he understood `the Mission of Christian Art' as informed by knowledge of the destiny of man.45 Crucial in Rio's account is the `e cole Romanochre tienne', unconnected with Byzantine decadence, which served as a bridge between `les inspirations primitives de l'art chre tien' and the schools destined to gather up and valorize this heritage. The latter survived into the fifteenth century although increasingly beset by `peintres schismatiques' devoted to the minute imitation of nature.46 While Rio is circumspect in defining `progress' within specific contexts,47 he represents these gains as converging over discontinuities in a development governed by teleological fatality, moving through sequences that appear to be calibrated with the motions of the Christian story itself. That story is pre-eminently a narrative of return, of loss and restitution, and that promise floats above the cycles figures by Dyce and by Rio.
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The question of return more generally haunts the use of `Christian art' in British criticism. Lord Lindsay reformulated the theme in his Sketches of the History of Christian Art (1847), a work that allegorizes Trinitarian doctrine in its textual order. Though Lindsay's historical account scarcely extends beyond the fifteenth century, it is situated within a completed theoretical development consisting of three phases. The earliest was the Egyptian, ruled by the (lowest) faculty of `sense' and practising architecture as its principal art form. Egyptian civilization was succeeded by that of the Greeks, whose leading character was `intellect' and their predominant medium sculpture. Animated by `immortal Spirit', painting assumed precedence in modern Europe, the third stage in Lindsay's configuration. Fra Angelico's followers influenced a later generation, and chiefly Perugino, whose bearing across the centuries on recent revival of Christian art by Friedrich Overbeck and his contemporaries in Germany is well known, Lindsay states. In his millenarian announcement of `the Second Regeneration of Catholic Christianity' as under way from the beginning of the nineteenth century, the final projection calls for `revival in Great Britain the pledge, it may be hoped, of a distinctly new style of Architecture, expressive of the Epoch in human progression of which Great Britain is the representative, as well as of a Sculpture and Painting founded, not on servile imitation, but on sound principles and the inspiration of genius'.48 Against the discourse of `Christian art' in the 1830s and '40s, one text, to my knowledge, questions the possibility and retrograde tenor of calls for return to an earlier stage of history, and of art history. This is `The House of Titian', an essay by Anna Jameson dated September 1845 that appeared in a collection of her periodical articles and other short pieces, Memoirs and Essays, of 1846 (plate 40).49 For didactic purposes, she here enacts an attempted return in pursuing traces of the presence of Titian in the Venice of the 1840s. Interest in Titian's residences and their surroundings in Cadore, S. Samuele in Venice, and from 1531 in the suburban parish of S. Canciano had been stimulated by publication in 1833 of Giuseppe Cadorin's Dello amore ai Veneziani di Tiziano Vecellio, delle sue case in Cadore e in Venezia, e delle vite de'suoi figli; Cadorin's sketch of the last of these houses is reproduced here (plate 41). At one level, Jameson appeals to the English tourist's fantasized desire to approach or recapture the painter's aura by visiting his former haunts. But in a deeper sense she makes Titian's house the central metaphor in an itinerary that engages reflection on the revivalist project. Jameson implicitly asks whether the nineteenth-century traveller can recover what is valuable in Titian's legacy by so literal an attempt at recuperation. Her course in the essay circles the issue, reframing the question. From the glories of St Mark's in its Venetian setting, she turns to `the great wonder of modern times' in the shape of a soon-to-be-completed railway across the Lagoon and to solicitations that she join the outcry against it. But why, she wonders, can those who find poetry in a `Gothic pinnacle . . . or a gladiator's circus' not find it `in this gigantic causeway and its seventy-five arches, traversed with fiery speed by dragons, brazen-winged'?50 In a query preceding that of Baudelaire in his Salon of 1846, she asks: why is there not a poetry of the modern? Why is it as if the sources of beauty `were reserved in heaven, and flowed no more to us on earth? Why should we be always looking back, till our heads are well 430
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nigh twisted off our shoulders?' In asking rhetorically if there is no future for productive effort, she raises the problem of knowledge in relation to historical time: can there be no `progress in the knowledge of the good?'51 It is a matter of ethical knowledge, not some Faustian insight, but the query opens the problem of how fixed or final cognition achieved in the past may be. Jameson uses another image of mobility to advance her reflection: the enchantment of a vast crowd in the Verona amphitheatre at a balloon ascension that hundreds watch from the structure's summit `in all the vividness of an Italian atmosphere' at sunset. Here she contests objections that the spectacle desecrated a Roman relic, suggesting instead that it betokened a `victory of mind', or of science, over ferocious ignorance, a rite `purifying . . . 40 Karl Vogel von Vogelstein, Portrait of those blood-stained precincts'.52 Anna Jameson, pencil, d. 1839, Staatliche The final stage of this meditation Kunstsammlungen, Dresden. confronts the anguished longing for return and despair before the `transitoriness of all human things'. For the feminist social critic that Jameson was (in writings represented moreover in the same collection), it seemed well indeed `that some things are transitory!' She proposes that if her readers believe, `as we must, if we have faith in God's good government of the world, that nothing dies that deserves to live; that nothing perishes into which the spirit of man has entered; that we [then] are the heirs not only of immortality in heaven, but of an immortality on earth . . ..'53 This is not a Christian perspective, but a historicist development of Lucretian philosophy. Compare the following assertion from On the Nature of Things, Book 1: `None of the things . . . which seem to be lost is utterly lost, since nature replaces one thing out of another and does not suffer any thing to be begotten, before she has been recruited by the death of some other.'54 In Jameson it is a question of cultural immortality, rather than of one (physical) entity dying and being replaced in a providential cycle of renewal, a question of the posthumous efficacy as it were of the art of the past. She says: `Why ask of all-various Nature another Shakespeare, another Raphael, another Titian? Have they not lived and done their work?'55 Wandering through medieval churches in Lombardy, she evokes an experience of faded frescoes and altars as impressive not `merely' for artistic excellence or because they induced a longing for past forms of faith, `but because in these enduring monuments the past was made present; because the spirit of devotion which had raised them, and filled them with images of beauty and holiness, being
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41 Titian's House in Venice from the sketch in Cadorin, wood engraving in Josiah Gilbert, Cadore, or Titian's Country, London, 1869, after drawing by Giuseppe Cadorin in his Dello amore ai Veneziani di Tiziano Vecellio, 1833, Venezia. By permission of the British Library.

in itself a truth, that truth died not could not die but seemed to me still inhabiting there, still hovering round, still sanctifying and vivifying the forms it had created'. Just the reverse was the effect on her of revivalist art when she crossed the Alps and saw frescoes by the second generation Nazarene Heinrich Hess and his pupils in the Basilica of St Boniface in Munich, begun in 1834 on the plan of an Early Christian basilica. These derivations from Christian Rome appeared as `factitious, second-hand exhibitions of modern religious art.' Implicitly she addresses the argument of Pugin by suggesting the vanity of trying `to reanimate the spirit of catholicism merely by returning to the forms. ``Still,''' she quotes Schiller, ```doth the old feeling bring back the old names;'' but never will the old names bring back the old feeling.'56 Jameson traces a wider helix in figuring her sense of how art continues to make its claim: `The real value, the real immortality of the beautiful productions of old art lies in their truth, as embodying the spirit of a particular age. We have not so much outlived that spirit, as we have comprehended it in a still larger sphere of experience and existence.'57 The motion and residue of changed understandings qualify an expanding and irreversible dynamic. Despite what might be implied in the pronouncement from Middlemarch with which this essay opened, Jameson made very scant reference to `Christian art'. It may, I hope, be apparent from the foregoing that the choice of `Sacred' rather than `Christian' in her 1848 volumes on Christian symbolism was deliberate in its 432
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historicizing direction. The Poetry of Sacred and Legendary Art, to give the original (aestheticizing) form of the title, was conceived within the scaffolding of reflections articulated in `The House of Titian'. With its also significantly titled sequels, Legends of the Monastic Orders, Legends of the Madonna and The History of Our Lord, her founding work on Christian iconography offered a magisterial exploration of art in the Christian tradition as a phenomenon of history and a rejection of `Christian art' as a summons to return to the forms of lapsed innocence and faith. Adele M. Ernstrom bec Lennoxville, Que Notes
The present article originated in a paper presented at the 1997 Conference of the Association of Art Historians in the session `Words from Images: The Vocabulary of British Art Criticism c.15501850'. I would like to express appreciation to the conveners on that occasion, Jeremy Wood and Carol Gibson-Wood, and to members of the audience for raising valuable points in discussion. My thanks also to Cheryl Porter for secretarial assistance . 1 Middlemarch was published in serial, then book, christianisme, ed. H. Desroche, Paris, 1969, for form in 187172. References are to the W.W. the latter's views on religion, including the widely Norton edn., New York, 1977, p. 130. resonating `Chaque a ge a son caracte re, chaque 2 ibid. institution sa dure e' (p. 65) and the statement: 3 Notes of a Journey through France and Italy in `L'e poque du XVe sie cle a e te la plus me morable The Complete Works of William Hazlitt (21 de toutes les e poques de l'esprit humain . . .' (p. vols), ed. P.P. Howe, London & Toronto, 1932, 126). For the posthumous development of Saintvol. 10, p. 240. Simonianism, especially the alternation of 4 `The Legend of the Death and Assumption of the `organic' and `critical' ages in the historical Most Glorious Virgin Mary' is given in Legends process, see `The Doctrine of Saint-Simon': An of the Madonna, London, 1852, pp. 3302. In the Exposition. First Year 18281829), trans. and ed. conclusion of this account, Thomas's doubt is George G. Iggers, New York, 1972. 10 Pugin, The True Principles of Pointed or overcome by the flower-filled tomb and the Christian Architecture, New York, 1973 [repr. girdle flung down to him by the ascending London, 1841], p. 38. Virgin. Raphael's Vatican Coronation is the final 11 `. . . [O]n the score of architectural excellence . . . example of Marian iconography treated in that science is at a very low ebb: in which state, I Jameson's study. fear, it will remain, unless the same feelings 5 Contrasts, St Marie's Grange, near Salisbury, which influenced the old designers in the 1836, p. 22. composition of their Works, can be restored: a 6 ibid., p. 30. result which, though I most fervently wish, I dare 7 Contrasts, with an Introduction by H.R. not at present hope for,' Contrasts, 1836, p. iii. Hitchcock, Leicester, 1969, p. iii. The text is that 12 Description historique et chronologique des of the 1841 edition. unis au Muse e des monumens de sculpture re 8 ibid., pp. 1617. monumens franc ais, 6th edn., Paris, an X [1802]. 9 Phoebe Stanton's essay, `The Sources of Pugin's As quoted in G. Levitine, The Dawn of Contrasts' (Concerning Architecture, ed. John Bohemianism: The `Barbu' Rebellion and Summerson, London, 1968), valuably calls Primitivism in Neoclassical France, University attention to Saint-Simonian views on the Park, Pa. & London, 1978, p. 92. character of `The Age' as `part of the `climate of habilitation des primitifs 13 S. Sulzberger, La Re opinion' in which Pugin grew' (p. 131). Pugin's flamands 18021867, Bruxelles, 1961, pp. 1617. debt in Contrasts to the theorized historicism of 14 `Description of Paintings in Paris and the Saint-Simonianism seems to me greater than she Netherlands in the Years 18021804' (Summer allows in emphasizing his undoubted differences 1804) in The Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works with it, along with English echoes of Saintof Friedrich von Schlegel, trans. E.J. Millington, Simonian thought that were more diffuse than London, 1875, pp. 11516. Pugin's. See H. de Saint-Simon, Le Nouveau

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`CHRISTIAN ART' IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY HISTORIOGRAPHY IN BRITAIN 15 Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad (2 vols), 3rd ed., London, 1839, vol. 1, pp. 267, 268. 16 National Gallery Report, 1858, cited in Martin Davies, The Earlier Italian Schools, London: National Gallery, 1961, pp. 3445. 17 M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, New York, 1972, p. 25. 18 `Ancient History and the Antiquarian' in A. Momigliano, Studies in Historiography, London, 1966, esp. pp. 247. 19 The History and Antiquities of the Conventual and Cathedral Church of Ely: From the Foundation of the Monastery, A.D., 673 to the Year 1771, Cambridge, 1771, p. i. The work's antiquarian bent co-exists with recognition of properly historical problems, such as the historical status of language in original documents and a conformation of Saxon, Norman and Gothic architectural history to which Ely's `curious' church is nonetheless seen as related. 20 Such an argument is made by P. Findlen in `The Museum: Its Classical Etymology and Renaissance Genealogy', Journal of the History of Collections, vol. 1, no. 1 (1989), in a discussion that assimilates the collection of objects to the assembling of texts and in which the museum is primarily a cognitive category. 21 `Modern German Painting', Quarterly Review, vol. 77 (March 1846), p. 326. 22 `Foreign Correspondence. The Museum at Cologne', Athenaeum (4 October, 1845), p. 967. Attribution of this article to Elizabeth Rigby is based on the marked file of The Athenaeum in the possession of The New Statesman. 23 `An Essay on the Whole Art of Criticism', The Works of Jonathan Richardson . . . intended as a supplement to `The Anecdotes of Painters and Engravers' [by H. Walpole], London, 1792, p. 120. 24 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, New York, 1950, p. 187. 25 On these developments, see The New Cambridge Modern History IX: War and Peace in an Age of Upheaval 17931830, ed. C.W. Crawley, Cambridge, 1965; Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, 2 vols, London, 1966; Olive J. Brose, Church and Parliament: The Reshaping of the Church of England 18181860, Stanford & London, 1959; Denis Gwyn, Lord Shrewsbury, Pugin and the Catholic Revival, London, 1946; Clive Wainright, `Pugin as a Church Architect', in Pugin: A Gothic Passion, eds Paul Atterbury & Clive Wainright, London & New Haven, 1994. 26 [Nicholas Wiseman], `State and prospects of Catholicity in England', Dublin Review, vol. 8 (February 1840), p. 244. 27 On Ecclesiology, see James F. White, The Cambridge Movement: The Ecclesiologists and the Gothic Revival, Cambridge, 1962. sie chre tienne dans son principe, dans 28 De la Poe re et dans ses formes: Forme de l'art, sa matie seconde partie, Paris, 1836. Impact of the work in Britain did not await its translation in 1854 by a Miss Wells as The Poetry of Christian Art. Steinmetz's essays, `The Literature of Art', appeared in the Dublin Review, vol. 12 (February 1842) and vol. 13 (August 1842). Reference here is to a later edition, London, 1889, pp. 235, 197. ibid., p. 245. For a discussion of debates around patronage in the period, see W. Vaughan, `The Crisis in English History Painting', in his German Romanticism and English Art, New Haven & London, 1979, esp. pp. 48. Pugin addresses the problem of architectural patronage in Contrasts, 1836, pp. 313. As in n. 14, p. 70. Description of the Chapel of the Annuziata dell'Arena; or, Giotto's Chapel in Padua, London, 1835. The plates were engraved after drawings by the author's husband, A.W., Callcott. ibid., p. 2. ibid. Quoted from a pamphlet of 1833 by two missionaries, Dr Prati and Sig Fontana, St Simonism in London, in Richard K.P. Pankhurst, `Saint-Simonism in England I', The Twentieth Century, vol. 152 (JulyDec 1952), p. 503. Contrasts, as in n. 7, p. 3. Pugin calls the Reformation punishment by Providence for `decayed faith', p. iv. ibid., p. v. The painter Henry O'Neil stated analogously in Two Thousand years Hence (1868, p. 222) that, except for their painted dates, it would be impossible to believe that PreRaphaelite paintings were produced in the nineteenth century (quoted by Paul Barlow, `PreRaphaelitism and Post-Raphaelitism: the articulation of fantasy and the problem of pictorial space', in Pre-Raphaelities re-viewed, ed. M. Pointon, Manchester, 1989, p. 78. Quoted by L. Errington, `Ascetics and Sensualists, William Dyce's views on Christian Art', Burlington Magazine, vol. 134 (August 1992), p. 492. ibid., p. 492. ibid., p. 493. London, 1844, pp. viiiix. Her commentary in The Art of Fresco Painting (London & Brighton, 1846) and in Original Treatises, dating from the XIIth to XVIIIth centuries, on the Arts of Painting in Oil, Miniature, in Mosaic, and on Glass . . . (2 vols, London, 1849) tends to challenge or displace current preoccupations with vehicle, as in the Van Eycks' supposed `discovery' of oil painting, by the weight it gives to the management of grounds. sie chre tienne, p. 234. Poe `Philosophy of Art', Dublin Review, vol. 1 (July 1836), p. 439.

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`CHRISTIAN ART' IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY HISTORIOGRAPHY IN BRITAIN sie chre tienne, pp. 235. 46 Poe 47 As when Giovanni da Milano's work is called superior to all productions of the fourteenth century in `l'agre ment du style and l'ame lioration sie chre tienne, p. 77); notable des formes' (Poe progress is seen in work that offered a prelude to flowering of the Umbrian School, chiefly in the work of Perugino in the late fifteenth century. 48 A.W.C. Lindsay, Sketches of the History of Christian Art (3 vols), London, 1847, vol. 1, p. cclxvii. Lindsay's use of `Catholic' for the Church of England registers the view that the Roman Church was schismatic. 49 Memoirs and Essays Illustrative of Art, Literature, and Social Morals, London, 1846. September 1845 is the period of a visit to Venice that Jameson made before returning to England via Munich, a major centre of revivalism. Outside England, challenges with some affinity to hers had been raised by, inter alios, L. Feuerbach in his Essence of Christianity, 1841 and F. Engels in `The Condition of England. Past and Present by Carlyle' (1844), Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3, New York, 1975. References here are to a later edition of the essay in Studies, Stories, and Memoirs, Boston, 1870, pp. 2901. ibid. `De l'He rosme de la Vie moderne' concludes Baudelaire's Salon of 1846, Oeuvres tes, Paris, 1961, pp. 94952. comple `House of Titian,' pp. 2935. ibid., p. 296. The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers: Epicurus, Epictetus, Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius, ed. Whitney J. Oates, New York, 1957, p. 74. `House of Titian', pp. 2968. ibid. ibid.

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