Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe, how much it altered her person for the worst.
—Swift, Thoughts on Religion
Iris Murdoch taught philosophy for five years at the Royal College of Art in London, and her travels were closely connected to her interest in art. She visited museums all over the world, and was particularly keen to see works by Benardino Luini, Jacopo Bassano, and Edvard Munch. She was deeply moved by Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection when she made the pilgrimage to his birthplace, Borgo San Sepolcro.
When I interviewed Murdoch for the Paris Review in the summer of 1990, she said,
I love painting. I love looking at pictures, and I did once very much want to be a painter. . . . I know a lot of painters. I know what painting is. I enjoy bringing in painting. I loved doing the Beckmann business in Henry and Cato. I admire Beckmann very much and I’ve seen a lot of Beckmanns.
When her husband, the Oxford professor of English John Bayley, commented on the importance of the role, visible and invisible, that paintings played in her novels, she replied, “You’re right. [My novels are] all just pictures, really.” Thomas Gainsborough has an important part in The Bell, Agnolo Bronzino in The Nice and the Good, Beckmann and Titian’s The Death of Actaeon in Henry and Cato, and Titian’s Perseus and Andromeda inThe Sea,
