Visuality and Unmediation in Burne‐Jones’s Laus Veneris

This article argues that a contest between the image and verbal knowledge is central to the work of Burne‐Jones and that this contest thematizes cultural tensions around the capacity of the visual arts to deal adequately with the new conditions of contemporary experience. Contrary to most established readings, I argue that Burne‐Jones’s painting possessed for contemporaries the possibility of critical potential in its resistance to the instrumental values of late nineteenth‐century modernity and that this potential was expressed most powerfully through their visual character. But if Burne‐Jones’s dream was critical in this way, it was also insecure. Opposing the visual to the word as forms of effective knowledge about reality, Burne‐Jones’s paintings of the 1870s nonetheless turn out to be dependent on the word and to enact a dialectic between word and image as a central part of their constitution