STEPHEN CHEEKE. Transfiguration: The Religion of Art in Nineteenth-Century Literature Before Aestheticism.

Abstract

In a lively survey of the ways in which John Ruskin, Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Walter Pater work with religious language and metaphor, Stephen Cheeke assesses their contribution to the emergence of Aestheticism. He suggests that when literature and art inhabit the spaces and forms of Christianity – and even ‘“identify” with its faith … while no longer experiencing Christ at all’ (p. 218) – they revaluate the relationship between the divine and the everyday and the old and new. Throughout, Cheeke remains alert to the transformative and affective power of looking at and being changed by art; he recounts how Stendhal had a nervous collapse outside the church of Santa Croce in Florence (p. 35), Ruskin had an experience of ‘un-conversion’ before Veronese’s The Presentation of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon (p. 135), and George Eliot and George Henry Lewes responded with such emotion to Raphael’s ‘Madonna di San Sisto’ they had to rush out of the room (pp. 18-19).