52 research outputs found
Transfiguration:The Religion of Art in Nineteenth-Century Literature
No full textTransfiguration explores the work of John Ruskin, Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Walter Pater, treating in particular the ways in which they engaged with the Christian content of their subject, and, in Pater's case, how the art of Christianity was contrasted with classical sculpture. Stephen Cheeke examines two related phenomena: idolatry (a false substitution, a sexual betrayal), and the poetics of transfiguration (to elevate or glorify subject matter not thought of as conventionally poetic, to praise). Central to the book is the question of the 'translation' of religion into art and aesthetics, a process which supposedly undergirds the advent of the museum age and makes possible the idea of a 'religion of art' as a phenomenon of late century Aestheticism. Such a phenomenon is prepared for, however, through the engagement with Christian painting and classical sculpture in the work of these four writers. All four thought carefully about the ways in which a particular mimetic impulse of 'making-live' in artworks could be connected to religious experience. This meant exploring the nature of the link between seeing and believing—visualising in order to conceive, to verify, but also in the sense of being acted upon by the visible. All four wrote about the great power of artworks to transfigure the objects of their attention. In each case, there emerges the possibility of a secret sexual knowledge hiding within, or lying on the other side of the sensuous knowledge of aesthesis. All four wondered whether this was inherently hostile to Christianity, or whether it may, finally, be an accommodation within it
Stephen Cheeke. Byron & Place – History, Translation, Nostalgia
No full textWilliam Hazlitt repeatedly suggested that Byron's poetry consisted of fine-sounding commonplaces and observed that the author of Childe Harold described the “stately cypress, or the fallen column, with the feeling that every schoolboy has about them”. This pretty damning judgement, shared by Arthur Hugh Clough (in his hexameter poem Amours de Voyage), may account both for the popularity of Byron's verse during his life-time and for the kind of posthumous fragmentation of the work into the “ma..
The Religion Of Art, Art For Art’s Sake: Dante Gabriel Rossetti And Walter Pater
No full textThis article assesses the meaning of the phrase “the religion of art” in the nineteenth century, taking “art” to denote literature, painting and sculpture, and focuses this question in relation to two central ideas: to the Coleridgean “Symbol” (his famous tautegorical figure), and to the conceptual provenance and meaning of the phrase “art for art’s sake” (an apparent tautology). From the former it traces contrasting paths for the idea of the “translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal” (The Statesman’s Manual 30). One is via the “art for art’s sake” movement and aestheticism (with close attention to Walter Pater’s writings), drawing upon Romantic Hellenism in order to challenge Christian ideas of transcendence. The other is through the writings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in which a relationship is posited between the Victorian poet and his Catholic antitype. The religion of art as it manifested itself in the 1840s and 50s is, I shall argue, significantly different from the religion of art as it emerged in Paterian aestheticism later in the century
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