ABSTRACT
Like Victorian literature, Victorian painting and other kinds of visual art make many interesting applications of biblical typology. Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites base a theory of symbolic realism upon it, and designers of stained glass, mosaic, and other church art use it both as a source of iconography and as a means of organizing entire decorative programs. Like literary applications of prefigurative imagery, pictorial ones also appear in secular art, thus providing yet another instance of typologys effect upon Victorian culture. Moreover, in painting as in literature Victorian applications are more varied even downright idiosyncratic compared with earlier uses in the visual arts, when it most frequently follows the Pauline interpretation as type of baptism. Ruskin, who creates works of literature to comment upon paintings, Rossetti creates an essentially new work of verbal art to explain a visual one. Rossetti's citation of the prophetical type from Genesis 3:15 in The Holy Family lead to relation of visual and verbal arts.
