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.