Introduction

Abstract

When trying to define ‘effective art’ in the 1890s, Walter Pater confidently cited the example of Edward Burne-Jones’s paintings. Few Victorian works of art more vividly capture the paradoxes of their age and medium than Burne-Jones’s The Golden Stairs (1880) (Figure 0.1). Every would-be category of explication is interrogated or transformed in the painting. Despite the evocation of antiquity, the work resists historical specificity: it could depict ancient Greece, or Rome, or as the reviewer for the London Times suggested, it is ‘hardly classical, or rather is classical of the renaissance, such as is often employed in the school of Mantegna’ (‘The Grosvenor Gallery’, 1880, p. 8A). (The Dantesque title also encourages the kind of medievalizing imaginative leap so familiar in Pre-Raphaelite art.)¹ Thematically, a musical performance of some sort is intimated, but the viewer never knows whether or not it is already accomplished or about to take place. A beautiful moment of perpetual undecidability is thus arrested in silence. Simultaneously, the aural liveliness of the women’s conversations can almost be heard. Tensions between movement and stasis are further intensified by the serpentine golden staircase that transects yet unifies the visual field, even as the multiplicity of poses among the 18 female bodies belies the static reality of the canvas. Traditionally, portraiture offers one dominant gaze to which the viewer responds; Burne-Jones’s painting stimulates and disperses our regard by representing many such exchanges.