A Provincial Fresco
“Middlemarch” and the Visual Arts

Area 10 – Scienze dell'antichità, filologico-letterarie e storico-artistiche

In his 1873 review of the novel, Henry James describes Middlemarch as « a picture — vast, swarming, deep–colored », thus highlighting the interplay between words and images that structures Eliot’s “study of provincial life”. Such a fruitful interlacing is also the main focus of the present study, which aims at exploring the role played by the visual arts in George Eliot’s masterpiece. After briefly retracing the history of « ut pictura, poesis » and the author’s aesthetic education, this work shows how Eliot capitalised upon the narrative potentialities of several pictorial effects to delve into her protagonists’ souls and address some of the thorniest issues of the Victorian Age.

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