Julia Margaret Cameron, La Santa Julia, 1867

La Santa Julia shifts the image of the Madonna toward modernity. Julia Margaret Cameron used a new image technology to revitalize religious traditions and yet also to introduce the possibility of a secular Madonna.

The photograph is a portrait of Cameron's niece and godchild Julia Prinsep Jackson (1846-95), daughter of Cameron's sister Maria, called mia. It was taken shortly before Julia Jackson's marriage to Herbert Duckworth. Julia Jackson was the model Cameron photographed most often. Cameron dearly valued all the portraits she made of her, especially La Santa Julia. In one surviving catalogue, at least, Cameron priced no photograph higher. La Santa Julia is both an exceptionally beautiful picture of an already beautiful woman, and a sign of momentous changes in the relationship between women's social roles and images of women.

Like all of Cameron's great portraits, La Santa Julia was inspired by its model. Cameron, herself a member of Britain's elite intellectual class, was attracted to what Julia Jackson's daughter Virginia Woolf (by her second husband Leslie Stephen) pithily called "Famous Men and Fair Women." Julia Jackson was renowned for her beauty in her time, and not only in her youth; she is the heroine Mrs. Ramsay of Woolf's great 1927 novel To the Lighthouse. While Cameron sought out female models for such gifts, as opposed to the accomplishments of her male models, she treated both women and men alike formally. Typically, Cameron emphasized faces by choosing simple settings, costume, and hairstyle. Subtly composing drapery, hair, focus, and light, as well as positioning the viewer close to, yet ever so slightly below her subject, Cameron created images that were both monumentally dignified and intimate. In La Santa Julia, for instance, Julia appears at once far away and close, gently inclining her head toward us, yet to our side, as if concentrating on some inner or otherworldly vision. The image is composed into a side of shining brightness and a side of more modulated shade. These effects are more striking when seeing the original print than when looking at a reproduction. Cameron chose a print format that would maker her portraits almost mirror the scale and location of her viewers' faces when her photographs were framed and hung on walls according to the conventions of her time (and ours).

Cameron named La Santa Julia a divine saint and also a real human being: her niece Julia. In Cameron's time, Catholic imagery of the past was being given new meaning. Taking their distances from the original Catholic contexts in which images of saints and Madonnas had been created, nineteenth-century art critics and art lovers saw lessons for their own more secular age in Renaissance and Baroque religious images by claiming to have found universal truths. British and American women were especially active interpreters, seeing in older images sanctification of a new femininity. The Catholic Madonna, notably, came to be seen as the model for the mother of a nuclear, individualist, and capitalist family. Julia Jackson, for example, who inspired art, nursed many sick family members, and raised seven children, was obviously not a Catholic saint (with an Italian name) but rather saintly by the gender, political, and economic standards of Victorian Britain.

Anne Higonnet

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