Biblical artists used romanticized Islamic scenes to defend Christianity against scientific doubt

Evidence

As Malcolm Warner has argued, these artists were able to provide a quasi-scientific foundation for Christianity at a time when it was under severe challenge by scientific discovery. Furthermore, they saw their romanticized description of Islamic worship as a metaphor for the simple and sincere Christianity of the Middle Ages, for which many Christian conservatives longed. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 197

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Said’s argument in Orientalism about how the West projected onto the East to resolve its own anxieties, and to the ‘immodesty’ article’s theme of projecting contemporary concerns onto historical/foreign dress.
• CANDY: That Pre-Raphaelites dressed ancient Israelites as Bedouins to give science-backed realism to the Bible is a genuinely tweetable irony.