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  • Painting the Bible: Representation and Belief in Mid-Victorian Britain
  • Frank M. Turner (bio)
Painting the Bible: Representation and Belief in Mid-Victorian Britain, by Michaela Giebelhausen; pp. xix + 246. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006, £55.00, $99.95.

Michaela Giebelhausen's book addresses an inherently interesting and extremely important topic in Victorian religious and cultural history, but the volume, which concentrates largely on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, is unfortunately much narrower than the title suggests. The book is stimulating and generally convincing so far as it goes; one only wishes it had gone further.

What sets Giebelhausen's volume favorably apart from many other treatments of Victorian biblical painting, however, is her excellent knowledge of mid-Victorian biblical criticism, which she convincingly argues deeply influenced Pre-Raphaelite painting. Working in this critical climate, Pre-Raphaelites saw as their task the articulation of a new kind of Protestant painting, what she terms "Protestant biblical naturalism" (33). Or as she says of William Holman Hunt, the goal was to produce "a historically acceptable and emotionally immediate image of Christ" (185), the difficulty of which had been transformed by the new, dissolvent analysis of biblical texts. According to Giebelhausen, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood combined naturalism, orientalism, and archaism in the pursuit of realizing what William Michael Rossetti termed "a sacred impression" (10). The result through the Brotherhood's rejection of earlier academic models was a series of mid-century paintings commencing with John Everett Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents (l849–50) that shocked and self-consciously vexed contemporary expectations of religious art.

The core of Giebelhausen's book is two long chapters that concentrate on Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Millais, and Hunt. Giebelhausen provides a particularly novel reading of Christ in the House of His Parents. The absence of idealism in Millais's image of Christ and his devotion to realism in detail overwhelmed viewers and critics, who in reviews and caricatures thoroughly explored by Giebelhausen portrayed Pre-Raphaelite religious art as ugly and deformed. After relating Christ in the House of His Parents to previous portrayals of Jesus in the workshop of Joseph, she surprisingly links the painting to Annibale Carracci's Butcher's Shop (c. 1580), which Millais is known to have seen in the collection of Christ Church, Oxford. Even though Carracci's work was associated with the very kind of art the Pre-Raphaelites repudiated, Giebelhausen argues that its combination of a family portrait with a genre scene could have provided Millais with the model for his own unsettling painting. Both Millais's and Carracci's work are further related by mutual "resonances of carnage and sacrifice" (121). Yet Giebelhausen [End Page 529] believes that Millais's painting represented a dead-end for Pre-Raphaelite biblical art that Hunt eventually overcame.

Hunt is the hero of Giebelhausen's analysis. During the decades that saw numerous lives of Jesus, Hunt believed it necessary to produce a new image of Jesus that would speak to an age for whom Jesus had become so historically problematic. As a result, no other Victorian British artist so successfully established himself as "the painter of Christ" (127). Hunt is most famous for The Light of the World (l851–53), which he painted three times. The earliest of these is to be found in the chapel of Keble College while the final and largest version hangs in St. Paul's Cathedral. According to Giebelhausen, the image, which became a great Victorian Protestant icon, emerged from the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic crusade but also from the depths of Hunt's own spiritual life and through an agonistic relationship to Thomas Carlyle. Throughout she argues that Hunt saw Jesus as a kind of "Carlylean hero who recognized his calling and accepted his self-sacrificing mission" (l67). Hunt saw the artist as similarly engaged in a vocation of self-sacrifice.

Readers of illustrated Bibles and viewers of paintings had come to expect a new realism of detail based on better natural history of Palestine and sharp examination of what many regarded as a timeless Palestinian way of life. Hunt visited Palestine and painted there, and he brought the barren landscape of the region into...

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