This book focuses upon the ways in which four major writers about art in the nineteenth century (John Ruskin, Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Walter Pater) engaged with the Christian content of their subject, and, in Pater’s case, how Christianity was placed in dialogue with the virtues of classical sculpture. The study will return to two related phenomena: the sin or error of idolatry (a false substitution, a sexual betrayal), and the poetics of transfiguration (to elevate or glorify subject matter not thought of as conventionally poetic, to praise). Central to the book is the question of the absorption of Christian language, conceptual systems, figures, and modes of feeling into a post-Christian literature, and the ‘translation’ of religion into art and aesthetics, a process that supposedly undergirds the advent of the museum age and makes possible the idea of a ‘religion of art’ as an aesthetic phenomenon. All four of the writers thought carefully about the ways in which a particular mimetic impulse of ‘making-live’ in artworks could be connected to religious experience. All four wrote about the great power of artworks to transfigure the objects of their attention. In each case, there emerges the possibility of a secret sexual knowledge hiding within, or lying on the other side of the sensuous knowledge of aesthesis. And all four wondered whether this was inherently hostile to Christianity, or whether it may, finally, be an accommodation within it.