Victorianized Romans: Images of Rome in Victorian Painting

Abstract

Victorian writers and artists gazed at the phenomenon that was Rome and found in it what they wanted and needed to find. Rome cast a longer shadow than did the Bible on the British upper and upper-middle classes, for whom Latin was a second language and Roman history a second past. The Bible's influence pervaded the culture of the classes below them, many of whose members had learned to read precisely in order to read the Scriptures according to evangelical interpretive and meditative practice. Since many individual members of the lower and middle classes rose in power, wealth, and social position during the Victorian period, cultural attitudes based on the Scriptures came into conflict with those based on the classical past. But for those in power, Rome and its grand, diverse, tortured, ambiguous history remained the predominant cultural example, though at times notions of chivalry and Hellenism rivaled its influence.

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