ABSTRACT

This chapter describes the ways in which writers in the Shelley circle responded to the religious art of the Renaissance and how these responses might modify ideas about the Promethean heroism of the Romantic creator. T. E. Hulme's often quoted remark about Romanticism as spilt religion' blurs together these significant differences. The view that Christianity acted as a restraint on the creative spirit derives from eighteenth-century writers like Shaftesbury and Daniel Webb, who had suggested that the morality of the Church was hostile to genius and that the arts declined under the influence of Christianity. The sacred artist's emphasis on the visible as an approach to the supernatural echoes the transcendent power of the sublime as conceived by Romantic poets. The religion of the heart, which is of vital importance in our understanding of Romantic humanism, shadows a significant shift in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century aesthetics, pointing us to ideas about the role of the artist in society.