For all these Victorian painters' devotion to feminine beauty, they could not paint that beauty. They sought out girls who were already pretty enough, then lengthened and strengthened their noses to be more Greek. And then they went completely astray in rendering the eyes, always, with sopping pools of paint. Shallow pools, though—no doubt these big dark shiny eyes were meant to be tragically expressive; but the tragedy is in how little they express. It is as if the young models' eyes have melted away; the painters smudged horribly around them, losing all definition—the painters became coy and backed off just where it mattered, because they had no conviction, no real idea.

It is not that Victorian taste in female beauty has gone out of fashion (on the contrary, it has rather influenced fashion photography). And these images do not fail to show beauty only because they fail to show heroines or goddesses. The problem is simpler. They fail to show women at all—these painted figures are devoid of character. The naturalistic touches, coldly observed and dotted across the bodies, are superficial, attesting only the physical facts of women as painters' models; then that contradictory smudging towards the classical form attests only a desperately mistaken idea of art's sake. The forms are empty; since they contain no character, there can be no femininity.

That explains the feebleness. In choosing to paint Andromeda, Titian, no less than Poynter, had been motivated principally by a desire to treat the female nude. But even if Andromeda was a pretext for Titian, he was still excited by the scenario, and he excited us with it. She was, after all, a pretext for him to paint dramatically as well as sensually. Not only did Titian keep the figure of Andromeda in character, he managed to fill her with character—and this despite the fact that Titian's forms were both less naturalistic and less formulaically classical. Perhaps Titian's Andromeda has character precisely because she is in character, because he painted her as Andromeda and not as a model. It was not Titian's most serious work, and there is even something cheap about the nudity. But we can enjoy it sincerely for what it is, and for what it was meant to be—for its drama and its sensuality. The same cannot be said for Poynter's painting.

There are other paintings in this exhibition with dramatic themes, and some of the painters sincerely attempted dramatic representation. But almost always there is a problem with the faces. These typically Victorian facial expressions do not relate well to artistic expressions. In Edwin Long's Queen Esther, or in Alma-Tadema's The Architect of the Coliseum, the figures appear like hammy actors. Really bad acting blights much 19th-century narrative painting, but something else altogether is also going wrong: in these painted faces we find such distracting incidentals, caused by those fatal "naturalistic touches". Despite the classicised features and the swollen eyes, these faces are somehow reminiscent of those we are used to seeing in photographs—they are paused between comprehensible expressions, and they are out of context. This style of painting coincided with the invention of photography, and the artists must have seen some potential in the faces frozen in photographs. And we might well sympathise with them because we still see what they saw and we continue to take for evocative what is merely unclear, and to take for important what happened only by chance. These paintings, like so many photographs, hint at emotion in the facial expressions, and promise emotion in the subject-matter; but they do not realise emotion. It is the failure to fulfil their promise that ultimately makes these paintings so disappointing. Millais's The Crown of Love, illustrating a poem by Meredith, is admirably composed, paying tribute to Giambologna and Bernini, and the landscape is appropriately moody. But the princess's facial expression, which is left to tell the whole story, is so vague; and it was deliberately made so vague, so transitory, in order to inspire our sentimentality. For all that, though, it ruins the picture.