Anna Jameson and Sacred and Legendary Art

Abstract This chapter examines Anna Jameson’s Sacred and Legendary Art, published from 1845 onwards. Existing scholarship focuses on how Jameson reclaims positive female figures from religious art, but I look at her wider conception of art. For Jameson, art is always expressive of the wider civilization it belongs to, specifically that civilization’s religious beliefs. She distinguishes two great ages of art: classical Greek and Christian Gothic. Because Christian art strains beyond finite expression, it always needs decoding, and Sacred Art provides this decoding for the heritage of European Christian art. For Jameson, Christian-era art was good art when it genuinely expressed popular Christian beliefs and legends which embodied people’s moral hopes for a better world. Jameson thus forged a triangular link amongst art, religion, and ethics. The chapter closes by considering John Ruskin’s criticisms of Jameson.