Stephen Cheeke, Transfiguration: The Religion of Art in Nineteenth-Century Literature Before Aestheticism

Abstract

DR CHEEKE teaches at Bristol, where no doubt he has had plenty of chances to see Henry O’Neill’s painting ‘The Last Moments of Raphael’ (1866), in the Bristol Museum, and reproduced here, where the dying Raphael gazes towards ‘The Transfiguration’ which he has painted. This work by Raphael, which attempts to put divine metamorphosis alongside the ugliness of life below, with the sufferings of the epileptic child, is the subject of a chapter here. And as a theme, this attempt to break out from an uncomplicated Christianity, seen as an issue in the sixteenth century, and discussed in the nineteenth, runs through the book, which declares itself to be about ‘the sin of idolatry and the poetics of transfiguration’ (2). It is a difficult and complex study, very learned, and making wide references, often very nuanced, and often very rewarding, with a particularly good chapter on profound ‘self-divisions’ (202) in Pater, who was, according to Edmund Gosse as quoted here, ‘not all for Apollo, not all for Christ’. Its theme is the decline of acceptance of Christianity in the nineteenth century, and the replacement of attention to this by a ‘religion of art’, which begins in the early nineteenth century—there is a good discussion of the origins of the phrase ‘art for art’s sake’ (46)—and by the end of the century, more narrowly, perhaps, a ‘religion of beauty’. That phrase is taken from Robert de la Sizeranne’s Ruskin et la Religion de la beauté (1897), discussed in the Introduction. The four authors principally discussed here are Ruskin, Browning, D. G. Rossetti, and Pater, but there is much too on Hazlitt, and his visit to the Louvre in 1802, where so many Italian masterpieces were to be found as a result of Napoleon’s depredations; and similarly, Arnold often appears in discussion, with the charge put against him, as quoted from T. S. Eliot, that his writings on religion argued that ‘Religion is morals’ (taken as a reductive account), and that ‘Religion is Art’. Eliot, with Cheeks following him only at a little distance, finds this a degradation of both philosophy and religion.