ABSTRACT
One of George Eliot's main aims in writing Romola was to create a convincing historical setting for her readers. Evoking late fifteenth-century Florence may have presented her with a more challenging task than the English Midland background of Adam Bede or The Mill on the Floss, but the novelist was determined to render Romola every bit as convincing. George Eliot incorporated the Fra Bartolommeo painting into Romola, describing the artist as 'that young painter who had lately surpassed himself in his fresco of the divine child on the wall of the Frate's bare cell'. By the end of Romola Tito himself has become the betrayer of the trusting woman, the man who was Bacchus has become Theseus, and Romola has become a despairing Ariadne on Naxos. Eliot's reference to an imaginary fresco in the Annunziata, and to Tessa's confusion of the Archangel with Tito, is one of a series of references to St Michael in Romola.
