In Painting the Bible: Representation and Belief in Mid-Victorian Britain, Michaela Giebelhausen charts the transformations of religious painting and the “troubled emergence of a unique form of naturalistic religious painting” (2) between the 1840s and the 1860s. Her analysis draws on two types of Victorian text: theories of history painting and biblical criticism. Both were marked by substantial controversies in the decades under investigation and ultimately circled around one unsettling question: What is the nature and reality of the divine? At stake was the very essence of Christianity, and the debates were accordingly fierce. In the battle over the Christian faith, the lines were manifold and complicated, as the antagonism was not only between faith and unbelief but also between different denominations. The story told by Giebelhausen is not the story of religious art per se, but of “Protestant biblical naturalism” in particular, with William Holman Hunt as its hero.

Although the book opens by asserting the centrality of religion to Victorian culture, its main focus is not biblical hermeneutics or religious politics but the “field of cultural production” (Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, trans. Randal Johnson, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993; and Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1996). Adopting Bourdieu’s sociological approach, Giebelhausen conceives of the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as the strategic struggle of newcomers to enter an established field: “Their preoccupation with religious subjects did not stem from strongly held religious beliefs; it represented a logical choice for a group of young artists who wanted to reform contemporary art” (87). This choice was “logical,” she maintains, insofar as the early Victorian art world regarded only this branch of history painting as still relevant to modern audiences (i.e., 2, 21, 36–39). There are, admittedly, some costs in Giebelhausen’s decision to place so much emphasis on religious subjects. For one, her claim might awaken skepticism, given the success of other forms of history painting, as in the explosion of classical subjects during this period. For another, it leads her to restrict herself to a small number of examples and to conceive her narrative as a series of essays connected by a theoretical focus rather than as a single historical argument. Finally, it forces her to conflate a select number of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood members with the “Pre-Raphaelites.” In her defense, Giebelhausen does not deny that there was a plurality of themes in the period’s history painting; but through her examination of seminal episodes, particularly in art criticism, she makes a powerful argument that religious painting was widely seen as the best vehicle for revitalizing ambitious contemporary art. In mid-nineteenth-century England, religious painting was still the torchbearer of the moral values traditionally associated with high art. And it was these values that the Pre-Raphaelites sought: sincerity, earnestness, moral elevation, and contemporary relevance. In this sense, as Giebelhausen discusses in chapter 3, their famously anti-academic stance reflected key themes in the academic discourse that surrounded them

Painting the Bible begins with a quotation from William Michael Rossetti: “The learning of the age may be a benefit to its art, or a misfortune; but it is a fact, and cannot be ignored” (1). What could not be ignored were the new historical methods and scientific discoveries that undermined established biblical truths. Their impact on the structure of the artistic field, however, was not one of simple cause and effect but a subtler transformation, effected by what Bourdieu calls “refraction,” whereby “the field’s structure refracts, much like a prism, external determinants in terms of its own logic, and it is only through such refraction that external factors can have an effect on the field” (quoted in Giebelhausen, 12). Giebelhausen remains true to this perspective, as she pursues her goal of tracing the various, often conflicting, forces at play. Inserting the Pre-Raphaelites into the thick fabric of Victorian academic discourse and art criticism, as well as contemporary practices of exhibiting and marketing, she describes the complicated relationship between the artists’ self-imaging and their reception. The Pre-Raphaelites reacted to the economic and institutional pressures they faced with a self-fashioned rhetoric of heroism, which Giebelhausen, while acknowledging its significance for the artists’ production and critical fortunes, deconstructs throughout her analysis.

The introductory chapter depicts a broad debate about the proper nature and social role of religious art, with the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Nicholas Wiseman, defending an eclectic, idealist art that emulates exemplary figures of the past (5–7), and John Ruskin and William Michael Rossetti advocating a new “Protestant” painting based on naturalism and scientific observation (7–17). Chapter 2 follows these debates into the more specific milieu of the academy itself, including both its professors and practitioners. Giebelhausen uses the lectures of two Professors of Painting at the Royal Academy as markers. Henry Howard, who held the office between 1833 and 1847, stood for a definition of history painting indebted to Joshua Reynolds. Averse to any claim for historical authenticity, Howard demanded an epic, universal, and timeless rendition of the past. His successor, Charles Robert Leslie, on the other hand, had a new openness toward pre-Renaissance art and a healthy skepticism toward a strict hierarchy of genres. He also welcomed greater naturalism and encouraged the inclusion of period detail and realistic settings favored by the new category of historical genre painting (think Paul Delaroche or Carl Friedrich Lessing on the continent). Leslie’s position reflected developments in religious painting that had taken place during the 1840s, when figures as diverse as Benjamin Robert Haydon, Charles Lock Eastlake, William Dyce, John Roger Herbert, and Daniel Maclise modified the “academic paradigm” (55). In experimenting with naturalism, a new archaism, and even Orientalism, these artists engaged some of the key themes of what Giebelhausen calls the “Pre-Raphaelite challenge,” but it was only the Brotherhood that profoundly challenged the established conventions of history painting.

Despite their repeated calls for a new and vital high art, however, neither art critics nor academicians accepted the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as the answer. Part of the provocation of Pre-Raphaelite painting stemmed from its paradoxical nature, which combined apparently contradictory impulses. As Giebelhausen argues in chapter 3, one ingredient was a radical archaism associated with earnestness and simplicity; its sources were “early art” (hence the name, Pre-Raphaelite) and continental models (the German Nazarenes). The other ingredient was a radical naturalism born from a keen interest in modern forms of perception and scientific observation. The resulting, and for many revolting, “symbolic realism” operated through a centuries-old principle of biblical hermeneutics, typology. Both a mode of representation and a method of interpretation (famously illustrated in Ruskin’s reading of Tintoretto), typology allowed “the successful combination of the two main operative modes promoted by the PRB: worship and experiment,” which led “towards the revelatory remaking of reality itself” (74).

Giebelhausen does not trace the inherently religious implications of typology, but rather develops a theory of the Pre-Raphaelite paradox based on caricature (87–111). Her starting point for this unexpected approach is to describe the defining criteria of early Pre-Raphaelite art—archaism and realism—as at once retrogressive and aggressive. This view, she claims, resonates strongly with Ernst Kris’s definition of caricature as a “joint policy of aggression and regression” (87). Of course, a pictorial strategy that sought to “discover a likeness in deformity” (92) inevitably would be opposed to the academic notions of the synthesized ideal and mimesis as progression. This explains the appeal of caricature to the Pre-Raphaelites who, for example, admired one of the best-known artists for the satirical magazine Punch, Richard Doyle (89–92). But paradoxically, caricature was not only a source of inspiration for the artists; it also served as the template for a severe critique of their work. Soon, the question “Giottesque or grotesque?” became the matrix for pathologizing Pre-Raphaelite art through and as caricature (Punch being ironically a prime example). This line of argument marked a decisive shift in public opinion, as Giebelhausen shows in her section entitled “A Step Too Far: The Signal for a Perfect Crusade against the PRB” (100–111). Many reviewers excused the first exhibited Pre-Raphaelite works as expressions of youthful inexperience driven by an understandable quest for reform (97–98). It was the exhibition of John Everett Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents at the Royal Academy in 1850 that made archaism and severe style no longer signifiers of reform but of sectarianism. The painting was regarded, and justifiably so, as “a truly anti-academic painting: it defied not only the stylistic conventions of the grand style but also its all-pervasive concepts of representing time and place” (114). As a result, the reaction to the group shifted from benevolent indulgence to harsh criticism (98). Unleashing frightful visions of retrogression and misguided forms of belief, Pre-Raphaelite painting became associated with deformity, Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory, and the fairy-ground freak show (100–111).

Giebelhausen’s long discussion of Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents (111–122) sets out to rescue the picture from its “long-lived and one-dimensional interpretation as a show-piece of Tractarian [High Church] propaganda” (68). Instead of turning to theology, she introduces an unexpected model for such transgression, Annibale Carracci’s The Butcher’s Shop (1580s), then displayed in the library of Christ Church College. Her discussion of the “Giottesque or grotesque?” prepares for this move by citing the Carracci as evidence of the dialectical and historical relationship between high art and caricature (92). The comparison to the sixteenth-century composition brings out Millais’s visual allusions to the violence of Christ’s sacrifice—the bleeding wound to his palm, the instruments of the Passion around him—which so shocked the painting’s original audience. To its mid-Victorian viewers, “the detailed naturalistic representation . . . threatened the spiritual investment religious painting had undergone during the 1840s” (122). At the same time, Giebelhausen argues, the hostile reaction to Millais’s painting reflected another underlying, deeper anxiety: the breakdown of any conventional connection between pictorial styles and specific forms of beliefs that threatened the very essence of religious pictorial practice (68).

Giebelhausen argues in her final chapter that it was William Holman Hunt who finally succeeded in creating a viable answer to the call for a new Christian art. Hunt’s engagement with religious subjects was driven by deep personal piety, which “resonated with the need of the age for a historically acceptable and emotionally immediate image of Christ” (185). His famous Light of the World (1852) was as much universal allegory as autobiographical testimony. Hunt’s Orientalism also reflected, Giebelhausen maintains, his personal desire to absorb historical research and scientific observation into a structure of Christian faith (esp., 164–170). In addition, Hunt adopted some of the contemporary innovations in bible illustration, which combined traditional, thus idealized, renditions of the biblical story with scientific images, especially maps and topographical views (134–147). A man of the Broad Church’s brand of liberal Protestantism, Hunt strove to affirm faith without compromising science or “historical truth,” and the success of his pictures, not least in printed form, attests to the success of his enterprise. For Giebelhausen, the fine balance between the historical and the divine nature of Jesus Christ achieved in the famous canvas of 1873, The Shadow of Death, “best exemplifies Hunt’s concerns” (185).

Although the chapter on Hunt focuses more than the others on issues of dogma and theology, Giebelhausen does not lose sight of her interest in the cultural field. Stylizing himself as the ultimate Pre-Raphaelite and painter of Christ, Hunt carefully structured his self-image around the notion of art as labor and biography as history, fusing his vision of the Messiah with his vision of himself as the artist delivering contemporary painting from evil. Faith and commercialism entered into a productive union, as Hunt’s religious art attained immense critical and financial success without the support of ecclesiastical patronage. While still nurturing the image of the anti-academic rebel, Hunt himself became an embodiment of the rhetoric of progress, nationalism, masculinity, and Protestantism that had initially fueled the attacks of his opponents.

Realism had hardly conquered religious representation when new resistance again arose against its seemingly all-pervasive hold. Giebelhausen ends her book with an epilogue about the new yearning for “ideal subjects glowing with poetry” that marked the 1870s and 1880s. The rise of the Aesthetic Movement fostered the evolution of a new poetic mode that included a “return to Blakean spirituality” (198). By ending with a moment when the dominant grip of realism lessened and the interest in Christ took on a spiritual or deeply poetic expression, Giebelhausen brings out the unity of the strand she has been studying and outlines its achievement and limitations.

Painting the Bible provides a succinct analysis of crucial categories that shaped the era’s artistic debates about high art and religious painting. The discussion unfolds against the background of the stark divide between academic and theological discourses that structured the reception of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. As Giebelhausen points out, Victorian art critics usually submerged religious issues beneath aesthetic and artistic concerns. Likewise, she herself elevates aesthetic matters over religion; and this distancing from the theological questions raised by Pre-Raphaelite art is furthered by her Bourdieuian emphasis on the rules of the cultural field. Giebelhausen fulfills her promise to chart the transformation of religious painting in a study moving from the broader scene of mid-Victorian art to a very focused examination of Hunt. However, the expectation of a hermeneutical engagement raised by her title Painting the Bible remains mostly unfulfilled. In her distinction between “internal” and “external” determinants, religion remains the latter, even in the last chapter, which maps out the theological background of Hunt’s “liberal Protestantism.”

Although Giebelhausen touches upon some basic issues of iconography, she does not offer a detailed exegesis of the Pre-Raphaelites’ often highly complex symbolic schemes. The issue of legibility is raised, but the textual nature of Pre-Raphaelite art is not further pursued. She does not discuss the conspicuous presence of text in Hunt’s images, a noteworthy omission because of its importance in assessing Hunt’s relationship to his continental forerunners, the German Nazarenes, who are constantly criticized for using text in and with images. Nor does Giebelhausen forge in-depth links between the Brotherhood’s imagery and theological source material, whether sermons, tracts, or devotional books. Other questions remain. The critics’ epithet of Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents as “pictorial blasphemy” raises the issue of how a down-the-line Anglican like Millais would have understood his contribution in religious terms. And how would the Pre-Raphaelite project fit into the broader history of Victorian piety, the era’s religious conflicts, and struggle over secularization? Giebelhausen’s book sheds valuable light on the sociological dynamics of religious painting within the wider world of mid-Victorian art, and she demonstrates very clearly just how central religion was to the revitalization of contemporary high art in the period. This emphasis provides a stimulating challenge to a historiography that has tended to push religion to the margins of its concerns. Her work challenges scholars to link this rich sociological model to a further exploration of the multiple layers of meaning involved in religious image-making.