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...