"On, up the nave, fresh shreds of her dress strewing the holy pavement--up the chancel steps themselves--up to the altar--right underneath the great still Christ: and there even those hell-hounds paused.
She shook herself free from her tormentors, and springing back, rose for one moment to her full height, naked, snow-white against the dusky mass around--shame and indignation in those wide clear eyes, but not a stain of fear. With one hand she clasped her golden locks around her; the other long white arm was stretched upward toward the great still Christ appealing--and who dare say in vain?--from man to God."
Charles Kingsley, Hypatia or New Foes with an Old Face (XXIX)
Given the brutal death of Hypatia, who was about sixty years of age when she died, her representation here is disquieting, as are the overwrought lines from Kingsley's novel (1853) that were quoted in the catalog of the exhibit. A parish priest, Kingsley was private tutor to the Prince of Wales and chaplain to Queen Victoria. He also was an advocate for social reform. In essays such as Nauiscaa in London: Or, the Lower Education of Women (1873), he argued that English women should pattern themselves after Nausicaa, who, while playing ball, unabashedly confronts a naked Odysseus in Book Six of the Odyssey. Educators should insist on the same strength of mind and body and
"on that most natural and wholesome of all exercises, dancing, in order to develop the lower half of the body; on singing, to expand the lungs and regulate the breath; and on some games--ball or what not--which will ensure that raised chest, and upright carriage, and general strength of the upper torso, without which full oxygenation of the blood, and therefore general health, is impossible; if they will sternly forbid tight stays, high heels, and all which interferes with free growth and free motion...and accept the certain physical law that, in order to renovate the brain day by day, the growing creature must have plenty of fresh air and play, and that the child who learns for four hours and plays for four hours, will learn more, and learn it more easily, than the child who learns for the whole eight hours; if, in short, they will teach girls not merely to understand the Greek tongue, but to copy somewhat of the Greek physical training, of that 'music and gymnastic' which helped to make the cleverest race of the old world the ablest race likewise; then they will earn the gratitude of the patriot and the physiologists, by doing their best to stay the downward tendencies of the physique, and therefore ultimately of the morale, in the coming generation of English women."
Now in the Laing Art Gallery (Newcastle upon Tyne), Hypatia, by Charles William Mitchell, was shown in 1885, the athletic pose illustrating just such a physique. St. Eulalia by John William Waterhouse was shown that year, as well, and has the same voyeuristic quality. In 1908, Elbert Hubbard published, as part of his Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Teachers, a fanciful essay on Hypatia. With a nod to Kingsley, who had "the composite of the great woman who lives and throbs through his book," Hubbard adds to the fictitious account, even including her height and weight. The accompanying sketch of a modest woman in profile, with eyes demurely looking downward, is the one most often used to illustrate Hypatia.
Reference: Imagining Rome: British Artists and Rome in the Nineteenth Century (1996) edited by Michael Liversidge and Catherine Edwards; Exposed: The Victorian Nude (2002) edited by Alison Smith.
