‘We have in these volumes, penned in a truth-seeking spirit and illustrated with a copious generosity which at once elucidates and adorns each section of the subject, contributions to the literature of Christian Art, for which every artist and every student of theology will confess debt of private gratitude. To thoughtful inquirers, richest mines are here opened for meditation. To minds prepared for deeper draughts to quench the thirst for knowledge, wells are dug and fountains are made to flow even in the desert tracks of time where pilgrim’s foot seldom attempts to tread. We think that Lady Eastlake has done special service in bringing into popular view recondite stores which have hitherto been sealed for public use. She has, by appeal to the early heads of Christ in the Catacombs, by reference to Christian sarcophagi of the fourth century, to ivories as old as the sixth century, and Greek MSS. and Byzantine miniatures of the ninth century, enabled the art-student to tract the history of types and antetypes, and to analyse the rudimentary germs which, from age to age accumulating strength and growing in comeliness, at length issued forth in perfected pictorial form. It is to this, the infancy of art, that at the present moment peculiar interest attaches.’

Blackwood’s Magazine.