ARIADNE AND THE RIPPLED NOSE: PORTRAIT LIKENESSES IN MIDDLEMARCH

Extract

LOOKING BACK to an earlier moment in its own cultural history, no Victorian novel works harder than Middlemarch at the integration of art and life, in terms of both the issues it addresses and its method of composition. Central to this effort is the art-related sequence (chapters 19–21) in which Will Ladislaw encounters the newly married Casaubons on their honeymoon in Rome. In the Belvedere Gallery of the Vatican with a painter friend, Will discovers Dorothea standing lost in thought near a famous Hellenistic sculpture of a sleeping, bare-breasted woman. Struck by the congruity of poses in two such different figures, Will's friend Naumann is on fire to paint Dorothea, and a few days later, rather in spite of himself, Will brings the Casaubons to Naumann's studio. Here, in one of the most broadly comic scenes in the novel, the painter persuades Casaubon to pose as Thomas Aquinas for a historical portrait, slyly securing his sketch of Dorothea during breaks in the sitting. Throughout the sequence, Will engages in aesthetic discourse first with Naumann, then with Dorothea, introducing her to the hugeness of art and, incidentally, to the smallness of her husband.