SOURCE: Malley, Shawn. “‘The Listening Look’: Visual and Verbal Metaphor in Frederic Leighton's Illustrations to George Eliot's Romola.” Ninetheenth-Century Contexts 19 (1996): 259-84.

[In the following essay, Malley suggests that the tensions between literary and visual art that run throughout George Eliot's novel Romola are paralleled by the tension between Eliot and her illustrator, Frederic Leighton.]

The relationship between verbal and visual representation is central to George Eliot's Romola, whose quattrocento Florentines—its painters, scholars, orators, philosophers, and aesthetes—are very conscious of the verbal and visual constructs that inform their world. Romola's satisfaction with Piero di Cosimo's commissioned portrait of her aged father, Bardo, is an important indicator of the dialogue between language and the visual arts, “‘Ah!’ she said at last, ‘you have done what I wanted. You have given it more of the listening look. My good Piero’—she turned towards him with bright moist eyes—‘I am very grateful to you’” (261). Though exultant, this response betrays something of the tension that exists between linguistic and pictorial expression in the novel, for Romola is not merely concerned that the two conjoin, but that painting be brought into accord with language, be given “the listening look.”

This tension reveals much about the form of Romola as an illustrated novel and, furthermore, the relationship between its author and illustrator, Lord Frederic Leighton.¹ Eliot's letters to Leighton² express her Romola-like concern for the sovereignty of the verbal form. While the visual arts are integral to the novel's setting and characterization,³ its author is hesitant to recognize in Leighton's work the artistic license that his ostensible counterpart, Piero di Cosimo, certainly desires. Eliot writes:

I am quite convinced that illustrations can only form a sort of overture to the text. The artist who uses the pencil must otherwise be tormented to misery by the deficiencies or requirements of the one who uses the pen, and the writer, on the other hand, must die of impossible expectations.

(Haight 4: 55-56)

The disparity between the written and visual texts, “that,” as Eliot concedes, “the exigencies of your art must forbid perfect correspondence between the text and the illustration” (Haight 4: 41), is essentially a linguistic issue, for both Eliot and Romola are concerned that the literal integrity of their language be preserved when translated into a visual form. But what each seems to sacrifice to her aesthetic convictions is the metaphorical nature of language and the centrality of language's metaphorical play in the visual arts. To Eliot's chagrin, Leighton does not produce an imitation of her manuscript, but a translation of the novel into a visual metaphor, which, when successful, furnishes the reader with a more meaningful awareness of the metaphors in the written text. So, instead of reading Romola as an illustrated novel within a hierarchy of artistic forms, we are witness to a wedding of genres: a marriage which is certainly contentious (as the Eliot-Leighton correspondence bears witness to), but not hypergamous. Indeed, the novel itself provides a theoretical framework for “reading” Leighton's illustrations within the verbal codes of the written text.

Set in Renaissance Florence, Romola examines the impact of the city's rich artistic heritage on the morale of its citizens. One of the first significant discussions on art occurs in Nello's barber shop (the proprietor's self-dubbed “navel of the earth” [32], a forum of sorts for debates on all matters of civic life) soon after Tito Melema arrives in the city. In an argument about what kind of face would best suit the traitor for Piero's intended study of Sinon deceiving Priam (42), the artist, who is very much the novel's spokesman for the visual arts,⁴ suggests that a fair face, Tito's being exemplary, would offer the best representation:

A perfect traitor should have a face which vice can write no marks on—lips that will lie with a dimpled smile—eyes of such agate-like brightness and depth that no infamy can dull them—cheeks that will rise from a murder and not look haggard.

(42)

Nello, on the other hand, exclaims that he “shall never look at such an outside as [Tito's] without taking it as a sign of a lovable nature” (44). Nello is so attracted to the purity of Tito's “fine visage” (42), so evocative of young Bacchus or Saint Sebastian (42), that he cannot see the nature of the man beneath (and seems to forget the grisly fate of the young, narcissistic Bacchus). Nello's response is indicative, moreover, of a dangerous lack of critical interpretation perpetuated throughout the novel. For Tito's innocent face does indeed mask a traitor's heart; in his Bacchic avoidance of unpleasantness, he betrays, as Romola eventually comes to realize, “every trust that was reposed in him” (588).

Piero's description of the consummate traitor's face, however, penetrates superficial detail. The artist is well aware of the necessity of interpretation, for he understands that painting is a metaphorical medium of integrated lingual and visual codes; he can, therefore, uncover the truth buried beneath visual symbol. At this early juncture in the novel Piero, of course, cannot know that his interpretation is prophetic, but he is well aware that the critical interpretation of visual metaphors—the reading of the surface detail—is necessary in order to bring a painting into accord with the dynamics of life it seeks to convey. Whereas Nello deals only with exteriors, which he constantly refashions according to his nature and trade as a barber (his loquacity is, he says, “simply the cream which I skim off my clients' talk” [37]), painting for Piero is both an interpretive medium that demands metaphorical expression by the artist, and a metaphorical medium that demands interpretation from the audience.

Tito's own understanding of visual art modulates between Nello's delusory literalism and Piero's veracious interpretation. And his relationship with art parallels his relationship with people, which is grounded in craftiness. His commission of the triptych from Piero to commemorate his betrothal to Romola, “the triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne … treated in a new way” (188), with himself as Bacchus crowning Romola as Ariadne aboard a sea-going ship covered with grape vines, ivy, and flowers, and with “leopards and tigers … crouching before him, and dolphins … sporting around” (188), is a hollow romantic gesture meant to charm Romola thoroughly. As Hugh Witemeyer points out, Tito manipulates the linguistic source, Ovid's Metamorphoses, by conflating the crowning scene with the god's sea-voyage:

Tito transfers the nuptials to a scene in Book 3 in which Bacchus is threatened with enslavement by the crew of a ship that is carrying him, disguised as a boy, to Ariadne on Naxos. In retribution for their ill-treatment, Bacchus manifests his divinity, turns the crew into dolphins, stops the ship in mid-ocean, and covers it with vines and cats. What Tito really commissions, then, is a picture of himself triumphant over slavers at sea, with Romola inserted as the final prize of the voyage.

(58)⁵

Tito's conflated “text,” this artful commingling of verbal and visual signs, effectively creates, in Nello-like fashion, an insipid meaning, “an illusion of harmonious sensuous surfaces” (Witemeyer 58). Furthermore, he interprets the iconography for Romola in an effort to corroborate the composition's artificial harmony with the state of their marriage. He tells her that the details are:

pretty symbols of our life together—the ship on the calm sea, and the ivy that never withers, and those Loves that have left off wounding us and shower soft petals that are like our kisses; and the leopards and tigers, they are the troubles of your life that are all quelled now; and the strange sea-monsters, with their merry eyes—let us see—they are the dull passages in the heavy books, which have begun to be amusing since we have sat by each other.

(202)

Tito's explanation convinces the naive Romola that he has indeed liberated her; his orchestration of the composition in fact symbolizes his manipulation of her affections. The picture, then, has only an ironic integrity, for Romola ultimately learns that to Tito she is indeed only a marital prize and that the triptych is but a “pitiable mockery” (330) of their marriage. Tito, like Nello, masks truth by persuading people of the verity of surfaces, but his project ultimately fails when those with Piero's penetrating vision peer beneath the distracting and pretty symbols and images in which Tito's outward identity is couched.

In Romola, while pictures do indeed inscribe the fabric of life beyond the static spatiality of their frames, the glossing of surface detail alone has only a limited or delusory bearing on the life it purports to convey. But striving for meaning in metaphor and image shows the vitality of the work in the life of the interpreter. Piero, for example, makes a profound statement on the nature and importance of interpretation when he is called to testify to his cryptic “symbolical picture” (33) of three masks in Nello's barber shop. Nello explains:

Ah! everybody has his own interpretation for that picture … and if you ask Piero himself what he meant by it, he says his pictures are an appendix which Messer Domeneddio [i.e. God Almighty] has been pleased to make to the universe, and if any man is in doubt what they mean, he had better inquire of the Holy Church.

(33)

“By refusing to interpret his picture,” says Sullivan, “he imposes on the viewer the same responsibility that that viewer must assume vis-à-vis the universe itself” (“The Sketch” 9). Piero's sardonic reference to the Church places the role of creation on the artist and on the audience: the artist and viewer need no intermediary, no church or, as Piero says, philosophers “spinning lies to account for life” (191).

An important statement blending life and art is the artist's exclamation to a gathering of his fellow Florentines: “Va! your human talk and doings are a tame jest; the only passionate life is in form and colour” (87). As a painter he observes and interprets according to his trade, “and as such,” claims Sullivan:

His almost instinctive tendency is to see the world in terms of its visual qualities. “Form and colour” are, for Piero, the sense correlatives of an inner life: they are real in themselves, of course, but they are also the metaphors for the reality of emotions and ideas which they suggest.

(“Piero di Cosimo” 395)

Witemeyer claims that these metaphorical links which connect art and ideas are, moreover, at the heart of Eliot's own aesthetics. She calls them “images.” And “Not all images are visual,” asserts Witemeyer,

but many are. From images come ideas, which result when the remembered sense-experiences lose some of their immediacy and, with the help of language, become signs or symbols. Images thus mediate between direct sensation and thought.

(35)

Such images are, writes Eliot, “the primitive instruments of thought” (“Leaves” 445).⁶ Thus, for Eliot (and Piero) the visual image and its signification describe a verbal semiotic which participates in the language of thought itself.

Yet Eliot is nevertheless suspicious of the interpretive and rhetorical aspects of Leighton's illustrations. A letter conveying her reservations about the first illustration, The Blind Scholar and His Daughter, is indicative:

I should have wished Bardo's head to be raised with the chin thrust forward a little—the usual attitude of the blind head, I think—and turned a little towards Romola, “as if he were looking at her.”

(Haight 4: 40)⁷

While Leighton's drawings naturally accord with the situations in the novel he chose to illuminate,⁸ they are not, as Eliot's animadversions suggest, simply mimetic. When viewed cumulatively, they tax Eliot's presumptions of mimetic representation even further, for they collectively create temporal effects which have narrative and, hence, interpretive properties. A striking and significant visual innovation is Leighton's rendering of Romola's bildung, a physical evolution that concomitantly squires her moral and personal growth, a development which is, in a visual sense, not present in the text. While these illustrations certainly diverge from Eliot's prose, they nonetheless enhance its moral vision, incarnate in Romola's “pilgrimage” from her cloistered life in Bardo's library to her life of civic responsibility and Christian altruism. This visual narrative demonstrates how metaphors in illustration serve to facilitate the interpretation of metaphor in the written text. As such, the images in Leighton's work and the language of Eliot's novel achieve some unity above and beyond the limitations of their respective genres.

But extraneous factors also influence the illustration and, thereby, the reader's reception of a novel. As Witemeyer observes, illustrations may derive meaning from their relation to other paintings in the illustrator's personal oeuvre (161). Although the aspiring painter (he was not elected associate member of the Royal Academy until 1864) had contributed two illustrations to Elizabeth Barrett Browning poems published in The Cornhill,⁹ he was the natural choice to illustrate Romola because of his work as an historical painter especially interested in Renaissance Italy (Leighton studied at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence during the winter of 1845-46 and lived and painted in Rome from 1852 to 1855). Among his early works are Cimabue Finding Giotto in the Fields of Florence (c. 1848-50); Signorelli Painting his Dead Son (1851); The Death of Brunelleschi (1852); Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna is Carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence (1853-55), which Queen Victoria purchased for 600 guineas; Paolo and Francesca (c. 1860-61); and Michael Angelo Nursing his Dying Servant (c. 1862).¹⁰ The painstaking historical detail of these works,¹¹ coupled with Eliot's and Lewes's admiration for Leighton (Haight 4: 37n), are factors which made the painter, in Lewes's opinion, “by far the best man to be had in England” (Haight 4: 37). Eliot acknowledges that “He is an invaluable man to have because he knows Florence by heart” (Haight 4: 49).¹² As a painter, Leighton is much more than a literal illustrator of the written text; he brings his painterly talents and sensibilities to the illustrations. Indeed, the rich outpouring of designs which filled the literary periodicals of the 1860s is due in part to the efforts of their illustrator-painters, who, according to Witemeyer, “aimed to bestow some of the dignity of painting upon their medium” (159).¹³

Comparing the Romola illustrations with Leighton's larger oeuvre, we see that the artist both borrows from his earlier compositions and anticipates subsequent ones. The explicit resonances between painting and illustration, and thus between his paintings and the novel, create a rich compositional intertextuality.¹⁴ Indeed, Leighton's Romola bears marked similarities to the female presences who populate his oeuvre, many of whom are derived from biblical and, increasingly from the mid-1860s onward, classical texts (Ormond 85). The physical similarities suggest metaphorical connotations: as such, the biblical and classical sources which Leighton consults throughout his career are vicariously “drawn” into his illustrations of Romola.¹⁵ This intertextuality is rich with connotative detail that enhances the verbal metaphors in the text, for Eliot's Romola assimilates both classical and Christian sensibilities as she develops in the novel. The ever-insightful Piero, for example, christens Romola as “Madonna Antigone” (261), which, as Chase points out, is a “central metaphor, suggesting … a convergence of classical and Christian values, in particular a union of personal loyalty and universal charity” (320).¹⁶

By examining the Christian and classical resonances of the artist's early and mature works as manifested in his representations of Romola, we may better appreciate the illustrations as they operate at both the visual and verbal level in Eliot's illustrated novel. Leighton's visual portrayal of the protagonist's moral and personal growth is autonomous, supplanting mimetic fidelity to the text with something deeper, richer, and more visually assertive. Yet its independent reverberations nevertheless provide a genuinely harmonizing counterpoint to the text, which is itself, as Witemeyer among others have demonstrated,¹⁷ vitally concerned with the visual arts.

Romola first appears in The Blind Scholar and his Daughter as a young woman of “girlish simplicity and ignorance concerning the world outside her father's books” (57). The Romola Leighton draws is perfectly suited to the atmosphere of the library she inhabits. Like the collected statuary therein, the figure of Romola, evocative of a “beautiful feminine torso” that invites “the lips to kiss the cold marble” (47), is a model of statuesque proportion and beauty. Indeed, her stylized deportment is reminiscent of the heroines of antiquity who dwell within, according to the Epicurean Tito, “the dull passages in the heavy books” (202). It is this “quiet majestic self-possession” (57) of Romola's physical presence that Tito is attracted to, kisses (as portrayed in the next illustration), and indeed marries. It is this visual image, one gathers, that he has in mind for his crowning of her as Ariadne in the triptych. Her bearing is certainly noble, but she is—as the description of the library with its “dark bronzes,” “marble, livid with long burial” (47-48), broken statuary, and preserved urn intimates—identified with her father's enervated and pallid classicism. Leighton thus creates an admirable Romola out of the linguistic codes that constitute her life of filial service to the blind scholar. She is, in short, a study in classical proportion: statuesque and inanimate.

This same passivity marks the next illustration, The First Kiss. The compositional arrangement propitiously conveys Tito's intent to control Romola by elevating her, as befitting her role as Ariadne, to princess-like stature, his “crowning” of her “poor life” (202). The illustration shows Tito manipulating her body (and affections), just as he similarly manipulates the composition of Bacchus crowning Ariadne. But she has, however, changed somewhat from the first picture; having been exposed to the outside world through Tito, who emerges as the living inheritor of the Hellenic world as opposed to the aged scholar, she is becoming flexible. Her body is more supple, signalling her burgeoning humanity which is very much the product of her painful life with Tito. Ironically, Tito's image of static, classical perfection is eroding in this blissful scene.

The Ormonds point out that “The Romola series was not the only expression of Leighton's … interest in Renaissance Italy. His oil painting of Paolo and Francesca was exhibited in 1861” (59). Leighton's depiction of forbidden love in this painting correlates both compositionally and thematically with The First Kiss. Not only are Paolo and Francesca situated in spatially similar positions to Tito and Romola (although seated and with the male and female figures reversed) but the lovers' countenances, hair, and clothing are remarkably similar to Romola's and Tito's. Francesca is likewise compliant in her lover's embrace.¹⁸ It seems that Leighton's conception of Romola and Tito began here.¹⁹ The hint of the library's books in the upper left corner of Leighton's illustration alludes also to Paolo and Francesca's “first kiss” while reading the tale of Lancelot together.

In her next appearance, in The Dying Message, Romola again changes. We cannot see her face, but her transformation is projected in her attitude, her “renunciation of her proud erectness” (161). She genuflects before the dichotomous figure of Dino—dichotomous in that he is both her lost brother, Dino, and the Christian brother, Fra Luca. This disparity reflects the tension between the classical and Christian worlds that her father and brother respectively embody: worlds that Romola negotiates over the course of the novel. Tension is created in the illustration by the juxtaposed verticality of Savonarola, who stands as a sort of grim inquisitor over the scene, and the recumbent Dino, with the folds of Romola's cloak unifying all three. Again she is pliant, but now before the pressure of the two Christian visionaries. Indeed, she is represented as a kind of repentant Magdalene figure, a likeness of the cowled woman in what appears to be a fresco above her. Importantly she clutches Dino's crucifix: this marks her religious quickening, the first spark of her new spirituality. The Church, which in “her mind, belonged to that actual life of the mixed multitude from which [she] had always lived apart” (157), becomes a tangible force in her life, for she assiduously participates in the “actual” life of Florence's “mixed multitude” as a sort of saviour figure to the plague-racked city. Indeed, she becomes more human and humane with her new awareness of the suffering in the world (largely at the hands of her cruel, self-serving husband) as she moves out of the library and into Piero's realm of colour and form. She discovers that it can be, like Piero's garden, a cruel world indeed, replete with, as Sullivan puts it, “‘nettles and hemlock’ among the ‘fig-trees and vines’—the destructive as well as the sustaining” (“Piero di Cosimo” 394).

The Dying Message is certainly representative of Leighton's interest in religious themes in the 1860s. As the Ormonds point out, the illustration recalls figures in the Lyndhurst fresco, The Wise and Foolish Virgins (1862-64), especially the cowled, penitent virgins: “The foolish virgins on the right, swathed in draperies and hooded, have the same haunting and slightly sinister quality as certain figures in the illustration to Romola which Leighton was designing at the same time” (Ormond 57).²⁰ And these hooded females are clearly related to what Susan Casteras calls the “enigmatic female personifications” (171) of Leighton's oeuvre, such as The Syracusan Bride (1865-66) and Captive Andromache (c. 1888).²¹ These conspicuous likenesses between illustration and painting suggest that by the third illustration Leighton, drawing more freely upon his own work, has become more comfortable with his representations of Romola: representations that clearly look beyond the boundaries of the novel.

The Romola of the next illustration, moreover, presages the tragic figures that proliferate in Leighton's later canvasses. In Coming Home, the impending doom of Romola's marriage is portrayed in her posture (which bears marked similarities with Salomé Dancing [c. 1863]), facial expression, and spatial position above Tito. He “toils up the steps under the unfamiliar weight of his new coat of mail” (Witemeyer 169), the burden that signifies his guilt and his fear of retribution, of being stabbed by his adopted father, Baldassarre, whom Tito has renounced and condemned to slavery, poverty, and ultimately madness. Romola's visage, moreover, has physically changed, has become more noble, more capable of expressing her deep sorrow at Tito's suspicious behaviour—his silences and increasingly long and unexplained absences—and yet remaining resilient under it. In the evolution of the novel and the illustrations, she becomes proportionately more dominant as her personal suffering, and her altruistic response to it, escalates. Though her love and trust are betrayed by her husband, her moral integrity matures through these trials: a growth that Leighton efficaciously conveys in his “new” Romola.

The commanding physical and emotional presence of Romola in Coming Home clearly foreshadows the single, often tragic women in Leighton's Ariadne Abandoned by Theseus (c. 1868), Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon (c. 1869), Clytemnestra from the Battlements of Argos (c. 1874), Nausicaa (c. 1878), Antigone (c. 1882), The Last Watch of Hero (c. 1887), Captive Andromache (c. 1888), Invocation (c. 1889), At the Fountain (c. 1892), Faticida (c. 1894), The Spirit of the Summit (c. 1894), Lachrymae (c. 1895), and Clytie (c. 1895-96). Significantly, many of these stoical tragic figures are drawn from classical mythology.²² The Ormonds recognize that Leighton “tackled some of the great themes of classical mythology, many of them significantly drawn from plays, and the majority with women as their leading protagonists” (89). Wood explains that “In choosing classical subjects, Leighton was constantly preoccupied with stories involving sadness, separation, death and mourning” (70).²³ Thus the rich literary affinities that imbue Leighton's canvasses vicariously find their way into the character of Romola, inviting—at least for the reader familiar with these later works—illuminating comparisons of Romola with the heroines of antiquity.

Leighton's Hero waiting for Leander is, for example, evocative of Romola's stylized expression of grief in Coming Home as she awaits Tito's return. Likewise, the isolated, anxious Clytemnestra and Electra lend something of their tragic fortitude to Romola's vigil. Theseus's abandonment of Ariadne aptly describes Tito's treatment of Romola, for he emerges as the heartless Theseus figure of the myth rather than the compassionate Bacchus. Antigone's life of service to her blind father is certainly analogous to Romola's; Piero for this reason chooses Bardo and Romola for his painting of Oedipus and Antigone. Antigone and Romola also share mournful dispositions: much like Antigone, Romola “inherited nothing but memories—memories of a dead mother, of a lost brother, of a blind father's happier time—memories of far-off light, love, and beauty” (59).²⁴ It is certainly presumptuous to assert a simple one-on-one identification between the lore surrounding Leighton's figures and Eliot's Romola, yet they do share marked affinities: affinities that are forcibly conveyed through Leighton's similar rendition of classical heroines and Romola. As such, the illustrations, which betray Leighton's interests as a classical painter above and beyond his function as illustrator, elicit narrative nuances outside of Eliot's text itself.

In The Painted Record—the very title averring the union of word and image—we have yet another Romola.²⁵ Next to the lithe Piero, she seems even more physically imposing than in the previous illustration and, likewise, more reminiscent of the robust and often stolid women who populate Leighton's canvasses. The painting Romola contemplates is of a young baccinate, Tito being the unsuspecting model, frightened in the midst of his revelry by the appearance of a ghostly apparition in the likeness of Baldassarre. This scene is important in that Romola correctly equates the fear Piero has painted into Tito's face with the secret behind the mail coat: his fear of this “ghost” from his past.²⁶ Her visage is grim, yet active (indeed, her face has markedly matured); her eyes probe the painting for hidden meaning; her body is bent under the heaviness of her suspicion. For the first time we truly see her animated and independent as she searches for the truth beneath the symbol.

She is also drawn dynamically in The Escape. Here she is tall and powerful though somewhat burdened by her sorrow and the fear that her own lie (i.e., masquerading as a pilgrim on her flight from Tito) will be exposed by the passing monks, one of whom is Savonarola. Again she is clearly related to the numerous suffering yet stoic heroines of Leighton's oeuvre: Clytemnestra, Electra, Andromache, Nausicaa, and his other representations of independent and isolated women found in Lachrymae, Faticida, and The Spirit of the Summit.²⁷

The presence of the monks in The Escape prefigures the next illustration, Father I Will be Guided. Here, Romola's attitude harks back compositionally and thematically to the Dying Message and is likewise evocative of the penitent Magdalene type. Solemnly bowed before the commanding figure of Savonarola, she becomes, like her brother Dino, a true Christian pilgrim. The crucifix she bears, once hidden away in the triptych (202) and then under her cloak (331), is now exposed upon her breast. Once a symbol of ignorance and superstition to be distrusted and secreted away like Tito's mail-coat, it now stands for truth, wisdom, understanding, and duty expressed through her universal altruism rather than purely filial devotion. Savonarola's arms, stretched in benediction over her, gesture towards Florence, which looms above her on the horizon like a vision of the New Jerusalem. The clock-tower of the Palazzo Vecchio rises like a beacon in the distance. She will be guided, back to Florence.²⁸ She becomes The Visible Madonna of the next illustration, with an active Christian mission of service to others. She, like the crucifix she bears, is now visible.²⁹

The cloaked, steadfast figure of Romola in Escaped recurs in the next two illustrations, which depict Romola with Tito and Baldassarre respectively. As her carriage, emphasized by the draping cloak, is similar in pose to Savonarola's at Dino's death-bed, his presence is articulated through her. In A Dangerous Colleague, the “black-shrouded figure” (405) of Romola is shown overhearing the plot to kidnap Savonarola while the ever-secretive Tito gestures to his fellow conspirator, the loutish, drunken Spini, to be silent. Romola, who “would guard the Republic from further treachery” (408), compels Tito to assure her in public of the Frate's safety, an act which compromises his standing in the partisan political world of Florence. She, a Savonarola figure in her own right, would make Tito act morally: “I am that part of you that will save you from crime” (407). In the next illustration the hopeless Baldassarre exhorts Romola, to cite the caption, “But you will help me?” (i.e. to kill Tito). But she, having appropriated Savonarola's rhetoric, responds, “I would help you in other ways. … I should like to bring you comforts, and make you feel again that there is some one who cares for you” (456).

The visual portrayal of Romola as Savonarola's acolyte in these two illustrations demonstrates how Leighton's visual resonances buttress the verbal ones. Just as meaning in narrative is (broadly) generated out of the dialectic between memory and expectation when reading, so, too, does memory serve to convey not only a strong sense of narrative (and hence expectation) in the illustrations, but metaphorical evolution as well.³⁰ Our expectation is well fuelled at this point, and the final illustration in the Romola series emphasizes the consummation of her moral progress.

The penultimate illustration, Drifting Away—so evocative of the epic, soul-searching female voyages of the Lady of Shalott and Elaine³¹—bears us there. In this her second flight from Florence, her husband, and now the politics of Savonarola, Romola is depicted with passionate self-reliance: her eyes follow the strong horizontal lines (especially powerful in the mountains which ripple out to the sea) that mark her chosen path. This is no stealthy escape, but one with conviction etched into her face. Her passage takes her to a nameless pastoral valley, a land where she is transformed yet again. And at this stage of the verbal-visual action, Romola assumes somewhat epic overtones, with formulaic sea voyages (“I have come from over the sea” is repeated no less than four times in the chapter “Romola's Waking” [562-66]), deaths and rebirths (for sleep and drifting at sea—Romola does both—are archetypal expressions of death and passage into the afterlife), physical and spiritual regeneration (she “resurrects” dying plague victims and restores hope to the desperate village), and a triumphant, life-fulfilling return to the homeland. Romola, in essence, embodies a Christian heroism.³²

This vision is fully realized in At the Well. Romola completely commands the scene with her Wagnerian presence, as she comes to the well to draw water for the sick villagers. In this chapter and illustrations she fully assumes her appellation, “Madonna Romola.” Indeed, there are strong biblical overtones in this composition. It is evocative of the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman in the Gospel of St. John (4: 1-31). Christ, journeying to Galilee from Judea, stops at Jacob's well for respite, but has no means to draw the water; a Samaritan woman comes along but refuses to draw him some for, as she says, “Jews have no dealings with Samaritans” (4: 9). Jesus responds:

If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, “Give me to drink,” you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water. … Every one who drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become a spring of water welling up to eternal life.

(4: 10-14)

The Samaritan's actions are much like those of the village clergy and parishioners who refuse to help the plague-stricken Jews nearby; Christ's response is that of Romola's, for she restores the sick, both physically and spiritually. And just as the Samaritan woman recognizes Jesus as the Messiah (4: 25), the villagers confuse Romola carrying an abandoned infant with “The Holy Mother with the Babe” (563). “The Madonna and Child,” the most popular theme in Renaissance painting, is in effect reproduced in the illustration, making Romola also a heroic Mary. And as the water jug she carries implies, Leighton's final representation of Romola is also clearly identified with antiquity: a small detail that nonetheless reinforces the importance of the classical world in Romola's visual and verbal characterization throughout the novel.

With her commitment to Christian charity, coupled with the strength and stoicism of the tragic heroines of antiquity, Romola actively participates in the social fabric of life around her. While Savonarola's Christian radicalism is ultimately untenable in a world governed by partisan politics, his vision has important ramifications in the more human and humane world inhabited by Romola. Appropriately, Savonarola's portrait (presumably painted by Piero) dominates the final scene, for he, like Piero, is an artist of sorts, whose creation, Romola, is at work in the life of Florence. We are reminded of his vision by Romola's words at the novel's close: “Perhaps I should never have learned to love him if he had not helped me when I was in great need” (588). Leighton's many faces of Romola are thus spiritual faces, metaphors representing Romola's journey through the novel.

Leighton's “illustrative drama” demonstrates the very real presence of temporal and rhetorical structures inherent in the visual arts. While his illuminations nominally strive to convince the reader of their literal depiction of the novel, it is the illustrator's interpretative interaction with the linguistic codes in both the novel and the pictorial arts at large that creates this realistic effect. Seen in this light, Eliot's disparagement of Leighton's artistic license seems most ironic, for his illustrations clearly amplify her protagonist's moral and personal maturation. Leighton's rhetoric, then, would convince the reader of the mimetic quality of his illustrations—that they somehow mirror the written text—but by appreciating the verbal resonances in the visual metaphors of his images, we can best view them as a product of representation, complete with their own linguistic and narrative vitality.

Notes

1. To the twelve instalments of Romola in The Cornhill Magazine, running July 1862 to August 1863, Leighton contributed 24 illustrations, 14 title vignettes, and a tailpiece to the Proem. He also designed the title page for the 1865 edition. His designs, drawn in chalk then recast in pen and ink on woodblocks, were engraved by Joseph Swain and W.J. Linton (Ormond 58). All of Leighton's designs are reproduced in Brown.

2. Only this side of the correspondence survives. See Haight (vol. 4). For a detailed survey of the correspondence during the production of Romola, see Brown (xxxiii-xl).

3. Witemeyer explores the ways in which Eliot's knowledge of Renaissance art lends shape to her characters (33-43).

4. William Sullivan asserts that Piero “embodies, as fully as any of George Eliot's artist-figures, the aesthetic tenets of his creator, and he provides a valuable perspective on the philosophical and moral values of his environment” (“Piero di Cosimo” 390).

5. For a discussion of the triptych's significance, see Bonaparte (86-109).

6. As Lewes similarly puts it in his essay “Principles of Success in Literature,” “Language, after all, is only the use of symbols, and art also can only affect us through symbols” (583). Witemeyer, assuming that “Eliot and Lewes thought alike on important questions of aesthetic theory” (176), frequently cites this essay.

7. Critical of other details in the drawing, the author, who admits that she “shall inevitably be detestable” to the illustrator (Haight 4: 40), seems to desire a larger say in the production of the illustrations: “Romola's attitude is perfect, and the composition is altogether such as gives me a very cheering prospect for the future, when we have more time for preparation. Her face and hair, though deliciously beautiful, are not just the thing—how could they be? Do not make yourself uneasy if alteration is impossible, but I meant the hair to fall forward from behind the ears over the neck, and the dress to be without ornament” (Leighton does furnish Romola with a plain dress for her next appearance in The First Kiss). She later writes, “I should very much like to have a little conversation with you. … I think we shall both benefit by a little talk together after you have read the second proof” (Haight 4: 42). Eliot continues to offer advice on scenes to illustrate and details therein; see Haight (4: 39, 41, 55).

8. The Cornhill publishers gave Leighton the liberty to choose scenes to illustrate.

9. Leighton designed The Great God Pan for “A Musical Instrument” (July 1860) and Ariadne for “Ariadne at Naxos” (December 1860). He later contributed nine illustrations to Dalziel's Bible Gallery (1880-81). See Ormond (188) for a complete list of Leighton's illustrations.

10. In this vein Leighton later exhibited An Italian Crossbowman and Dante in Exile in 1863 and 1864 respectively. The figure of the vigilant crossbowman standing guard at a portal appears in the title vignette for the November 1862 part of Romola. Rich with the kind of historical detail of Florentine life that characterizes The Death of Brunelleschi, the vignettes are important for visually establishing the novel's sense of place and time. See Haight (4: 39).

11. Cimabue's Madonna, for example, “is derived from a wide variety of sources, but it does reveal more than a passing knowledge of the forms and ideas of early Italian art” (Ormond 27). Conrad notes that Leighton's conscious historicism in Cimabue is similar to Eliot's in Romola (126-27). See the Ormonds' discussion of Leighton's knowledge of fifteenth-century Italian art in relation to his historical painting (27-31). See also Wood (38-41).

12. The correspondence suggests that the author and illustrator often collaborated on such historical details as language and costume (Haight 4: 39-40, 42-43, 56). This aspect of their relationship is indicative of Eliot's own scrupulous attention to historical verisimilitude. For a survey of her extensive research prior to and during the writing of Romola, see Brown (xv-xliii) and Appendix B, “George Eliot's Preparatory Reading for Romola” (676-79). See also Haight (vols. 3-4) and Ann Ronald's disparagements of what she sees as the overly pictorial quality of Eliot's “digression into renaissance Italy” (260). Ronald concludes that “Historicity becomes panorama; characters, mere portraits. Actions becomes frescoed panels; symbols, only colored lines” (269).

13. Forrest Reid acknowledges the eminent role of painters in book illustration during the 1860s: “This was the really great period, during which the output of first-rate work was remarkable. It would have been more remarkable still had not drawing on wood be regarded by several of our artists only as an interesting experiment, and by others as a method of keeping the pot boiling when the more serious work of painting failed to do so” (1). Beginning with Gleeson White's 1896 English Illustrators. “The Sixties.” 1855-70, art historians have recognized the 1860s as the consummate era of wood engraving. According to White, the Sixties school was actually launched in 1855 with the publication of William Allingham's The Music Master, illustrated by Rossetti, Millais, and Hughes. Reid's Illustrators of the Eighteen Sixties remains the most exhaustive study of the period. See Witemeyer (159) for a list of the era's principal painter-illustrators. For a concise history of the phenomenon of the illustrated magazine, its production and readership, as well as the predominant personalities and publications of the 1860s, see Houfe (107-35). Muir's book provides a history of the Dalziel Brothers' contribution to the age (129-48); see also Ray (90-96). For a more detailed study of the technical aspects of production refer to Wakeman (69-81) and to Lindley. For a survey of illustration in nineteenth-century England, see Bland (242-76).

14. The Ormonds recognize that Leighton's art in the early 1860s was “between styles” (55-61). His illustrations therefore invite illuminating comparisons with his earlier and later works. The Ormonds, moreover, acknowledge the influence of his painting in some of the Romola illustrations (58-59).

15. Newall asserts that Leighton “felt that his vocation as an artist who could raise the standard of English painting would be satisfied only if he undertook serious subjects from ancient literature and the bible” (62).

16. For discussions of classical and Christian metaphors in Romola, see Alley, Bonaparte (20), and Carpenter and Landow (310-13).

17. Building upon foundations laid by the Ormonds, Witemeyer recognizes the importance of studying Leighton's illustrations to Romola in light of the artist's oeuvre (164-65). Whereas Witemeyer focuses on Leighton's penchant for painting languorous, recumbent females (as in Flaming June and The Garden of the Hesperides) in relation to Tessa at Home (May 1863), I am more concerned with the correlations between Leighton's stronger female presences and his depiction of Romola. Witemeyer's examination of “repetition and variation of pictorial structures within the Romola series, a technique by which the artist can imitate temporal narrative sequence” (161), has a more direct bearing on the present study. Especially compelling is his elucidation of these temporal narrative effects by treating pairs of illustrations as “diptychs” (166). Utilizing this notion of visual narrativity, I collectively treat all twelve illustrations of Romola as a visual narrative and, pushing this relationship further, consider Leighton's images as metaphors which illustrate and contribute to a more meaningful awareness of metaphors in the written text. For more comprehensive examinations of theoretical issues raised by the interaction of visual and verbal forms of representation see Harvey, Hodnett, Meisel, Phillipson, Skilton, and Steiner.

18. Leighton's illustration and painting are remarkably similar to Rossetti's earlier handling of the scene in a 1855 triptych. See Henderson (34) for a colour plate of the triptych.

19. It would likewise appear that both Leighton's Nello in “Suppose You Let Me Look at Myself” and, as Witemeyer observes (167), Bardo in The Blind Scholar and his Daughter, are resuscitated from his 1851 drawing, Signorelli Painting his Dead Son. Eliot was, however, much more appreciative of Leighton's efforts with Nello: “Unmitigated delight! Nello is better than my Nello. I see the love and care with which the drawings are done” (Haight 4: 41).

20. The Dying Message is also indicative of Leighton's penchant for death-bed scenes, e.g. Signorelli Painting His Dead Son (1851), The Death of Brunelleschi (1852), Count Paris and Juliet (c. 1856-58), and Hercules Wrestling with Death for the Body of Alcestis (c. 1869-71). It is especially reminiscent of The Reconciliation of the Montagues and Capulets over the Dead Bodies of Romeo and Juliet (c. 1853-55). The hooded, grieving figure of Juliet's mother draped over her daughter's body (a pose which reappears in the Lyndhurst fresco) foreshadows Romola's deportment in The Dying Message.

21. Particularly relevant to Leighton's portrayal of Romola are Casteras's chapters “The Middle-Class Heroine,” “The Victorian ‘Sister of Charity,’” and “Courtship and Marriage.”

22. Among his other mythological studies of women are Orpheus and Eurydice (c. 1864), Helen of Troy (c. 1865), Venus Disrobing for the Bath (1866-67), Actaea, the Nymph of the Shore (c. 1868), Hercules Wrestling Death for the Body of Alcestis (c. 1869-71), Psamathe (c. 1880), Phryne at Eleusis (c. 1882), Cymon and Iphigenia (c. 1884), The Bath of Psyche (c. 1890), Return of Persephone (c. 1891), and Atalanta (c. 1893).

23. “Many artists in history have developed a key symbol or image, which provides a focal point for their deepest artistic ideas and aspirations. With Leighton it was the melancholy, brooding, female figure, a type that was to feature frequently in his late works. Some of the best examples are Nausicaa (1878), The Last Watch of Hero (c. 1887), Solitude (1890), Lachrymae (c. 1895), and finally the despairing Clytie (c. 1895-6)” (Wood 62).

24. See Bonaparte, Chase, and Joseph for studies of the figure of Antigone in Victorian literature.

25. Eliot remarks on this transformation: “If you feel any doubt about the new Romola, I think it will be better for you to keep to the original representation, the type given in the first illustration, which some accomplished people told me they thought very charming. It will be much better to continue what is intrinsically pretty than to fail in an effort after something indistinctly seen” (Haight 4: 55). That Leighton does indeed stay with (and further develop) the “new Romola” suggests that he was striving to create Romola's character visually as it evolved in the novel, that he in fact was trying to effect “something indistinctly seen” rather than something outwardly “pretty.” Intimations of this indistinct quality may, I suggest, be gleaned throughout his oeuvre.

26. Compare De Jong.

27. “Whereas in his mythological subjects, such as Perseus and Andromeda and The Bath of Psyche, Leighton had frequently represented woman as the victim of man, or as dependant upon his mercy, in [the] late paintings she exists as an independent and isolated being, and she seems proudly indifferent to her fate” (Newall 133). Compare Drifting Away and At the Well. Of Leighton's “sibyl-like figures,” “The largest and most monumental … is Faticida. The source is … Michelangelo, the figure lounging back and yet dominating the picture space with her menacing bulk. Fate and the transience of life are expressed by this mysterious demi-goddess, who looks abstractedly into the past and the future” (Ormond 124). The Ormonds say that “In The Spirit of the Summit, Leighton symbolized his aspiration towards the highest ideals, and the asceticism which went with it” (127).

28. See Bonaparte (177-202).

29. The Visible Madonna is almost identical to Leighton's 1862 painting, Sisters, whose title, as Newall explains, is “an afterthought; the painting might equally have represented a mother and daughter” (36).

30. We might better appreciate Leighton's mutable Romola by considering the circumstances of his own reading of the novel. According to Witemeyer, “He worked from the page proofs of each instalment, without an overview of the finished story” (158). His image of Romola would seem to evolve much like any other reader's: as the novel unfolds.

31. For discussions of the sea-journey motif, see Carpenter (“The Trouble” 116-120) and Wolff. See also Lottes's analysis of the visual representations of the journey in “The Lady of Shalott” by Victorian painters Waterhouse, Millais, Hughes, and Rossetti.

32. Bonaparte asserts that Romola, so atypical of Victorian fiction, may be better viewed as “the first distinctly modern epic” (27) symbolizing the history of Western civilization. Building upon Bonaparte's work, Carpenter in George Eliot and the Landscape of Time, likewise argues that “Eliot planned a narrative project that maps out an epic history of Western civilization and a prophetic interpretation of Christianity” (106).

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