Hesterna Rosa , Found , Hamlet and Ophelia , and Mary Magdalene

This work has been reproduced on behalf of the author for web publication with minor corrections and formatting changes, and the addition of hyperlinks to images of paintings and illustrations mentioned in the text. Readers wishing to refer to this essay should use the original place of publication: Bentley, D.M.R. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Disegnatore: Hesterna Rosa, Found, Hamlet and Ophelia, and Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee,” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies NS 18 (Fall 2009): 41-67. DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI AS DISEGNATORE: HESTERNA ROSA, FOUND, HAMLET AND OPHELIA, AND MARY MAGDALENE AT THE DOOR OF SIMON THE PHARISEE D.M.R. BENTLEY He showed me many designs for pictures: they tossed about everywhere in the room; the floor at one end of the room was covered with them, and with books… He taught me to have no fear or shame of my own ideas, to design perpetually. — Edward Burne-Jones remembering Dante Rossetti (qtd in Georgiana Burne-Jones 1:130, 149) In its entries for “design” as a noun and as a verb, the Oxford English Dictionary traces the origin of the word in both lexical categories to the Renaissance Italian disegno and its cognates, which denote activities and their outcomes that are both representational and intellectual: to design or to make a design is to realize a rational concept (plot, purpose, intention) in a visual form that is often preliminary to a final image. In Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, Michael Baxandall further clarifies the meaning of disegno with reference to Cennino Cennini’s Il Libro dell’Arte (1437), where it is associated with “pencil, lines, the representation of edges, [and] perspective” and distinguished from colorire and its associations (“brush, tones, the representation of surfaces, [and] rilievo”) in a “dichotomy … [that] made drawings and painting … the ‘foundation of the art of painting’” as it would be “taught and … observed” for centuries to come in Europe (139-40). Little, if any, of this would have been news to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who read Italian, owned Giorgo Vasari’s Vite (1550, 1568) (where the drawing/painting dichotomy is assumed),1 and may have used Cennini’s handbook as a basis for his depiction of Chiaro, the literally pre-Raphaelite and prototypically Pre-Raphaelite artist of “Hand and Soul” (see Bentley, “Merrifield’s Edition”). But the [41] assumptions and practices denoted and connoted by disegno are especially helpful as a means of approaching the ROSSETTI AS DISEGNATORE pen-and-ink designs that Rossetti made in the immediate aftermath of the dissolution of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1853, for seldom before or after Hesterna Rosa (1850, 1853), Hamlet and Ophelia (1853-58), and Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee (1853-58) did his drawings exhibit the combination of intellectual intensity and meticulous draughtmanship, “depth and completeness” (Waugh 96), that characterize the disegnatore— the “exponent and design”—in the full meaning of the word. The fact that all three drawings focus on women who are either repentant prostitutes or, in the case of Hamlet and Ophelia¸ accused of being a prostitute draws them together thematically as well as technically into an ensemble that is closely related to the unfinished Found (1853-58), the first study for which is less meticulously executed2 but worth consideration under the same umbrella as a further instance of Rossetti’s practice as a designer and his continued adherence in the aftermath of the P.R.B. to the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic of “intimate intertexture of … spiritual sense with … material form: small actualities made vocal of lofty meanings” (W.M. Rossetti, “Critical Comments” 250).3 I According to William Holman Hunt in Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Hesterna Rosa (“Yesterday’s Rose”) was begun or already in progress in the autumn of 1850 when he and Rossetti were painting “background[s] [from] nature” at Knoll Park near Sevenoaks in Kent in less than ideal weather conditions. “I … found … [Rossetti] nearly always engaged in a mortal quarrel with some particular leaf which would perversely shake about and get torn off its branch when he was half way in its representation,” recalls Hunt. “Having been served thus repeatedly he would put up with no more … [and] stalk … back to the lodgings to write and try designs, one of these being the scene in the tent of [Henry Taylor’s] Philip van Artevalde, with which he did not succeed in satisfying himself and so abandoned it” (1:257). In the annotations to a letter written by Rossetti while at Sevenoaks, William E. Fredeman asserts that he “completed … Hesterna Rosa … on his return to London” on 13 November 1850 (Correspondence 1:156), a statement that is not corroborated by William Michael Rossetti in the P.R.B. Journal but does accord (assuming that it refers to the “design” only) with the inscription across the bottom of the finished drawing: “Composed—1850—drawn, and given to his P.R.B. Brother Frederic George Stephens—1853” (qtd in Surtees 1:121). Only two of Rossetti’s own later references to Hesterna Rosa and to the watercolour versions of it that he made in 1864 and 1871 are of more than very [42] marginal interest, the first being a request to Stephens for the temporary loan of the drawing that assigns it the title “Dice-playing” in accordance with the action at its centre (Correspondence 2:182) and the second a description of one of the watercolours that also applies to the drawing: the “scene represented is a pleasure ten at the close of a night’s revel now growing to dawn” (qtd in Surtees 1:22). In the watercolour, the time of day is indicated by the blue tone that the dawn light lends to the objects in the tent, but in the drawing it must be deduced from the darkness of the trees that are visible outside the “pleasure ROSSETTI AS DISEGNATORE tent” and by the “gaunt and ghostlike shadows of … [the] revellers” that the lamps inside the tent cast “ominously upon … [its] canvas walls” (Stephens 30). That dice-playing (wagering) is a focal point but not the main theme of Hesterna Rosa is clear from the lines from Philip van Artevalde that Rossetti inscribed beneath the drawing in two columns that replicate spatially and thematically the binarism and conflict that they describe and that the scene above represents: Quoth tongue of neither maid nor wife To heart of neither wife nor maid: “Lead we not here a jolly life Betwixt the shine and shade?” Quoth heart of neither maid nor wife To tongue of neither wife nor maid: “Thou wag’st, but I am worn with strife, And feel like flowers that fade.” (qtd in Surtees 1:21) Apparently the appeal of this passage for Rossetti and the theme that he sought to illustrate in Hesterna Rosa is the psychophysical effects on a woman—the title’s “Yesterday’s Rose”—of indulgence in pre-marital sex. As represented by Taylor, the condition of being neither chaste not married is one of internal conflict in which, try as she may to convince herself that she is happy, a woman knows in her heart that quite the reverse is true: to be “neither maid nor wife … wife nor maid” is to inhabit a twilight realm that is emotionally and physically debilitating and possible deadly, for a fading rose will never regain its lost and diminishing vitality. Like the title of Hesterna Rosa, the garlands of flowers that adorn the heads of the women in the drawing reflect the “flowers that fade” of Taylor’s dialogue and anticipate Rossetti’s association of fallen women with plucked and/or discarded flowers in Found, “Jenny,” and several other works. They also help to bring the drawing and the quotation into a relationship similar to that of the engraving and poems in the emblems of the Anglo-Dutch tradition that probably contributed to Rossetti’s understanding of how images can be related to texts and vice versa (see Bentley, “Anglo-Dutch”). To represent the binarism and conflict at the heart of Taylor’s lines, Rossetti uses a highly contrived allegorical scenario. In a setting that resembles a small stage with backdrop and side-scenes, two men stare downwards at their [43] dice game, one oblivious to the emotions of the woman whose voluptuously bare arms are wrapped around his neck and the other distractedly kissing a finger of the other woman’s hand in a gesture that Stephens describes as “goat-like” (30). One of the women—the equivalent of the “tongue”/speaker in Taylor’s lines—faces to the right of the picture space and gazes upwards in a state of ecstasy while the other—the equivalent of Taylor’s “heart”—gazes downward in painful thought with her hand on her forehead shielding her eyes and “half hiding her face” (Stephens 30). To the right of the group (and in telling ROSSETTI AS DISEGNATORE proximity to the phallic handle and scabbard of the nearby man’s sword) sits a personification of the Lust (or Vice) into which the women have fallen in the form of a “huge” Düreresque “ape, grossly scratching himself” (Stephens 30). To the left stands a personification of Chastity (or Virtue) in the form of a young girl wearing a fastened loin belt and playing a psalter. On the floor near the ape are a fan and a pair of gloves, the former a traditional attribute of a coquette or a courtesan and the latter an obviously sexual trope and perhaps an allusion to the gloves, the former a traditional attribute of a coquette or a courtesan and the latter an obviously sexual trope and perhaps an allusion to the glove on the floor in Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience (1853-54).

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