Transfiguration: The Religion of Art in Nineteenth-Century Literature Before Aestheticism by Stephen Cheeke (review)

Stephen Cheeke's Transfiguration: The Religion of Art in Nineteenth-Century Literature Before Aestheticism examines the ways in which John Ruskin, Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Walter Pater navigated Christianity in their artistic subjects during what seemed to be an increasingly secular age. Cheeke aims to study what he calls "the poetics of transfiguration," or the translation of the secular into the religious and vice versa (2). All four writers in Cheeke's book grapple with the problem of idolatry: that is, that art itself could take the place of religion. As Cheeke notes, "The expansion of a public for art, and the assumption that paintings could offer some kind of surrogate experience for religion, is attended, then, by a deep suspicion throughout the century" (25).

Ruskin is the central figure in these Victorian interpretations of transfiguration and idolatry, and Cheeke's chapters on Ruskin are among the strongest in the book. Chapter 5, "Ruskin's Conversions," argues persuasively that Ruskin was both deeply attached to and deeply skeptical of the image as a substitute for the religious. Cheeke's main subject is Ruskin's "Queen of Sheba Crash," the phrase that Ruskin used in Praeterita (1885) to describe his rejection of his evangelical beliefs upon viewing Paolo Veronese's The Presentation of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon (1580) (Ruskin qtd. in Cheeke 136). Cheeke reads this event as a continuation of Ruskin's struggle to prioritize Christian theoria, or a higher contemplation, over the merely sensual qualities of art. Ruskin had consistently rejected the too easy notion of evangelical conversion, Cheeke asserts, and so his "Crash" may most accurately be read as a recommitment to his faith rather than as an abrupt change in faith. Particularly given the number of scholars who have tried, with varying degrees of success, to cast Ruskin's views as consistent, Cheeke's ability to do so in this context is admirable.

Cheeke's fourth chapter, "Ruskin's 'Fra Lippo Lippi,'" traces the ways in which Ruskin's vexed prioritization of theoria over sensuality motivated his long-running feud with Browning. Browning's Lippi—"lascivious, venal, and weak-willed"—conflicted with Ruskin's view of the painter as serious and religious (129). As Cheeke observes, Browning, by contrast, believed "that religious painting of the finest order might come out of the struggle between the sacred and profane desire in the artist" (130). Browning, in fact, emerges as the more interesting figure in this chapter, which is in large part due to Cheeke's illuminating readings of Browning's poem. Cheeke opens the chapter by quoting from Browning's "Fra Lippo Lippi" (1855), illustrating that the artist helps us to "love" what we normally pass without notice: "Art was given for that—/God uses us to help each other so, / Lending our minds out" (qtd. in Cheeke 108). For Browning, art allows both pleasure and the worship of God.

Cheeke is equally convincing in interpreting other poems by Browning. In chapter 3, "Browning and the Problem of Raphael," Cheeke shows the ways in which "Pictor Ignotus" (1845), "Andrea del Sarto" (1855), and The Ring and the Book (1868–69) dramatize the tensions inherent in representing Raphael as both purely Christian and idolatrous. Browning's dramatic monologues demonstrate that the suspicion of Raphael is not limited to the Victorian age, but is also a problem in the Renaissance. As a result, Raphael appears in Browning's poems as both the embodiment of religion and as a harbinger of decay.

Chapter 7, "Walter Pater's Indifference," makes a similar argument to the chapters on Ruskin: that Pater's works are "remarkably consistent in their particular form of inconsistency" (196). Cheeke draws another parallel with Ruskin in showing the ways in which Pater's so-called indifference has an ethical dimension in connecting both to and beyond personality. Cheeke, however, is less clear on what...