ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the employ music imagery to illustrate female vice and purity and the belief that the former might be transformed into the latter. It argues that music iconography played a special part in the thick pictorial and literary lexicon of the Victorian era: its utilization could show radical spiritual conversion. Indeed, the Pre-Raphaelites' self-conscious use of music imagery in their works is evidence of the persistence of a much earlier art-historical and theological tradition that associated music with both sin and virtue. While Saint Augustine's auditory conversion may seem a mystical experience unique in the annals of Christianity, the sense of hearing and the organ in which it resides have long been considered effective means of perceiving knowledge of God. The motion from mourning to penitence to conversion can be a short, if fluctuating, one, and there is one figure who transcribes that motion in both Jewish and Christian traditions: David, who was both musician and king.
