ABSTRACT
William Holman Hunt's 1853 painting The Awakening Conscience shows a young kept woman in a gaudily decorated parlour rising from the lap of her lover, interrupting him as he plays and sings Thomas Moore's ballad "Oft in the Stilly Night" from the sheet music propped on the piano. Sheet music like "Oft in the Stilly Night," and the parlours for which it was destined, epitomized in the Victorian mind the vaunted values of home, which ostensibly kept at bay moral scandals like the one depicted in Hunt's painting. Saint Cecilia's iconography shows her discarding worldly music for an inner music that marks her transformation from Roman noblewoman to contemplative musician. Indeed, the iconography of Saint Cecilia, emblematic of the possibility of profound spiritual change, continued to find its way onto the canvases of nineteenth-century English artists, and even into early experimental photography.
