Abstract
In her History of Our Lord, Elizabeth Eastlake completed Anna Jameson’s ‘series’ on Christian iconography as the fi rst extended study of Christological imagery in the English literature of art. Applying trinitarian doctrine to her material, she criticized what she considered Michelangelo’s dereliction in representing God the Father as Creator on the Sistine ceiling, while exonerating of the same charge, for its artistic value, Raphael’s Creation of Light (Vatican Loggia). The experience of an antinomian relation between religion and art, adumbrated earlier when Eastlake castigated Ruskin for elevating idea-content over the artist’s means, marks a crisis of interpretation in the Victorian historiography of art. It implicitly challenged artists and critics of the aesthetic movement to frame non-creedal or syncretic approaches to the sacred, as instanced in writings of Swinburne and Pater and in paintings by Millais, Rossetti and Burne-Jones.
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