The Pre-Raphaelites marked a rebellion against the social
standards of Victorian England. They were idealists
who wanted their work to reflect that of the medieval
period, a simpler time in which art possessed a more
spiritual meaning contrary to contemporary Academic
conventions. Dante Gabriel Rosetti was one of
the most passionate artists involved with this movement.
His own ideal of female images did not reflect the
"proper ladies" of the era. He appears obsessed with the
standard of beauty that is very natural and
comparable to the female figures of Sandro Botticelli,
an artist whom the Pre-Raphaelites admired, as seen
in The Birth of Venus(Canaday 79).
Rosetti's women subjects appear very natural looking
with their flowing hair and gowns and almost languid
inward gaze--unlike the blond, fragile, corseted female
that personified the ideal of Victorian times.
His wife, Elizabeth Siddal, embodied perfectly this standard
of beauty. After her death from a laudanum overdose in 1862, it
was then encapsulated by his mistress
and wife of fellow artist William Morris, Jane Burden.
In his work, he used these figures of women in his
illustrations from myth and literature, such as The
Bible, Shakespeare, and Dante.
Many of the stories to which he alluded express his
opinions about the women with which he was obsessed
and his idea of women in general. He often depicted
women characters that symbolized his
feelings about tragic love, his obsessive relationship
with Jane Burden, and female sensuality.
In the 1850's, Rosetti shared the Pre-Raphaelite
fascination with the idea of the tragic innocent
woman, such as Ophelia in Shakespeare's Hamlet.
This can be seen in The First Madness of Ophelia.
In this painting, Rosetti gives his perception of a
scene which is not in the play by depicting his own
in which Ophelia, the victim of her rejected love for
Hamlet and the death of her father, having gone
insane,is escorted out of the court into
which she has just burst. He made several sketches
of Elizabeth Siddal as the ill-fated woman.
She also posed as the same character in Millias'
Ophelia. In fact, she bacame so closely associated
with the character, that she even identified herself
as Ophelia in her own poem titled
A Year and a Day. Elizabeth's portrayal of
Ophelia exhibits the way in which Rosetti associated
his wife with the tragic victim of love. In 1860,
Rosetti completed Dantis Amor, one of many paintings
illustrating Dante's Divine Comedy. This work,
with its flat, almost modern background, features
Elizabeth as a symbol of love. Her winged figure of
love is different from the usual personifications of
love such as Venus or Cupid in that she holds a solemn,
almost sad expression and the arrow she is holding
looks deadly. By using her figure, the artist seems
to associate his new wife with a somewhat negative
view of love.
This painting may denote the feelings that Rosetti
held about love at the time, for his relatiopnship
with Elizabeth was not going well since they had just
married after a long tumultous engagement during
which he had somewhat alienated Elizabeth with
numerous infidelities (Hawksley, Hacking 104).
She was suffering from a long-term illness and
often used this as a tool to make Rosetti feel
guilty and not break the engagement. Dantis Amor
reflects the tension bewteen his obsessive love
of his wife and his negative feelings about it.
After two years of marriage, following a miscarriage,
Elizabeth Siddal committed suicide with an overdose
of laudanum. In 1864, Rosetti finished a memorial
to her titled Beata Beatrix, depicting an image of
Elizabeth as Beatrice from The Divine Comedy
The painting with its wealth of symbols, shows a
parallel between the death of Elizabeth and that of
Beatrice. The figure of Beatrice sits in a trance
state as a dove drops a red poppy, a symbol of
sleep, into her hands. According to art historian
Elaine Sharpe, the dove was an important symbol to
Rosetti because he often referred to Elizabeth as a
child or wounded bird for which he must care, often
associating her with the dove, an archetypal
Victorian bird. In this painting, as Sharpe implies,
the red dove is a perversion of this idea for it is
a bearer of death (441). This painting culminates
Rosetti's depiction of tragic love embodied by
Elizabeth Siddal, but it is only the beginning of
his obsession with painting women as symbols.
Although Elizabeth had passed away, Rosetti continued
to depict women with her facial type. He soon began
to employ the wife of fellow artist William Morris,
who with her long, flowing, dark hair, embodied the
Pre-Raphaelite ideal even more so than his wife.
Rosetti became obsessed with her as she bacame his
model and mistress. Because she was married,
Rosetti seems to feature her in paintings as an
imprisoned woman.
One such painting is another Divine Comedy
illustration from Canto V of Purgatorio titled
La Pia de Tolemai. This piece illustrates the
part of the poem in which Dante meets La Pia,
whose husband imprisoned her in a fortress and
eventually killed her either deliberately ofr
through neglect. She sits in the fortress among ivy,
a "symbol of a "clinging memory" staring at her wedding
ring, which was once a symbol of love and joy but is
now only a mockery (Hawksley, Hacking 115). In front
of her is a rosary resting on top of old love letters
from her husband. By painting Burden as this
character, Rosetti seems to exhibit his feelings
about the model's marriage.
In his mind she was a prisoner held against her
will.
Another painting featuring Jane that reflects this
theme is Proserpine. Proserpine, or Persephone
in Greek, is the daughter of Demeter, whom Pluto,
having fallen in love with her, kidnaps and takes to
Hades to rule as his queen. Demeter, stricken with
grief, begs Zeus to convince Pluto to return her to
earth. Zeus ordains that she may return as long as
she has not eaten any fruits in the underworld, but
she is tricked into eating six pomegranate seeds, and
therefore, must spend half the year in Hades with
Pluto and the other half on earth with her mother.
Jane depicts Proserpine holding the pomegranate,
whose bright red flesh draws the eyes to her equally
intense lips. The shadow and the shaft of light
behind her symbolize her time spent in Hades and on
earth respectively. By painting Jane in this manner,
Rosetti seems to show that he feels he must share
Jane with her husband similar to the way Demeter must
share her daughter with Pluto. Both this painting
and La Pia d'Tolomei seem to illustrate Rosetti's
feelings about the marriage of his model and mistress.
Rosetti also used the women that he knew to symbolize
his ideas regarding female sensuality in general.
These paintings from his later period are referred to
as "visions of carnal lovelieness" (Hawksley,
Hacking 12). One such painting, Bocca Baciata,
features Fannie Cornforth, a rumored prostitute.
On the back, Rosetti copied these lines from medieval
author Giovanni Boccacio, "The mouth that has been
kissed loses not it's freshness: still it renews
itself as does the moon". The poem implies that
sexual knowledge is not to be condemned but
celebrated( 12) This is a surprisingly liberal
view regarding women's sensulity during the
Victorian period. Rosetti's painting shows his
agreement that a woman with her reputation should
not be scorned.
Another piece depicting his idea of sensuality is
his Venus Verticordia. Rosetti rarely painted
nude figures, but it seems appropriate to depict the
Roman goddess of love in this manner. This is a
very sensual portrayal of Venus as she holds the
apple presented to her by Paris, which is also a
symbol of of female sexuality, and one of Cupid's
arrows. What is interesting is that the steel arrow
looks like a feather touching her breast, a very
suggestive image (112). This gesture of eroticism
shows the figure of Venus to be the personification
of sensuality.
Rosetti takes the idea of sensuality a step further
by depicting the ancient Assyrian love goddess
Astarte Syriaca This portrayal of the cruel fertility
goddess for which Jane Burden posed is Rosetti's
ultimate idea of female sensuality. The rich, deep colors
and strong contrast amplify the high level of
eroticism that the painting depicts. The goddess
Astarte is even more exotic than the typical
portrait of the Roman Venus or the Aphrodite of
Greek Myth. Here, Burden poses as a symbol of the
ultimate sensuality even more convincingly than
before.
Throughout his career, Rosetti drew upon what was
occuring in his life at the moment, always making
his work appeal on a personal level. He revealed
his personal feelings regarding women and female
beauty through the characters that represent
archetypes. In doing so, Rosetti revealed what was
occuring in his personal relationships.
The passion and zealousness of this artist and the
other Pre-Raphaelites filled a gap left by the more
shallow and superficial work of their Victorian
contemporaries.
Hawksley, Lucinda and Hacking, Juliet. Essential Pre-Raphaelites. London: Dempsy Parr, 2000.
Sharpe, Elaine. "Deverel, Rosette, Siddal, and the Bird in a Cage." The Art Bulletin, Vol. 67, Sept. 1985.
