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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). Beside the girl stands an altar surmounted by a candle and chalice that place her innocence as well as the two women’s fallen state in a Christian context of sin and redemption. Given the allegorical framework and the wealth of emblematic details that surround the revellers, it is only to be expected that even their clothes, which derive in large part from an 1844 edition e e e 4 of Camille Bonnard’s Costumes historiques des XIII ,​ XIV ​, et XV siècles and serve to set the ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ scene in the Renaissance, can be read symbolically: whereas the girl wears a plain dress that, like her fastened loin belt, bespeaks her innocence, the male revellers sport shirts with ornately patterned sleeves and the women wear patterned dresses and enhancing jewellery, in one case, a necklace and, in the other, an arm band with a pendant heart. All in all, Hesterna Rosa conveys the idea that women who have given in to vice and lost ​ their virtue are not only doomed to psychologically and physically debilitating feelings of conflict and remorse, but also destined to be disdained and discarded by the male partners in their moral slippage. In this, the drawing looks back to William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress ​ (1732), which, of course, depicts the downward trajectory to disease and death of a young woman who deviates from the path of virtue into the world of vice. Since Hogarth had become a central presence in the work of the Pre-Raphaelites and their associates by 1853,5 it is scarcely ​ surprising that his influence is discernible in at least two aspects of the drawing: the use of a small table as a centre-piece for the action (as is the case in Plates 2 and 3 of A Harlot’s ​ Progress) and the placement of the two revelling women between personifications of Lust or ​ Vice and Chastity or Virtue (in Plate 1 of Hogarth’s series, the future harlot [44] faces towards a ​ procuress and a lecherous old man and away from a lamentably neglectful clergyman).6 Indeed, ​ the use of an ape to represent Lust or Vice may have been suggested in part by the monkey in Plate 2 of A Harlot’s Progress and the use of dice-players as revellers by two other engravings ​ by Hogarth, Southwark Fair and Plate 6 (“Scene in a Gaming House”) of The Rake’s Progress. ​ ​ ​ ​

II

“My time has lately been engrossed by the background of my modern subject, which I have been painting out of doors in Chiswick,” Rossetti told William Allingham in a letter of 15 October 1854: “I paint daily within earshot almost of Hogarth’s grave—a good omen for one’s modern picture” (Correspondence 1:388). The “modern picture” to which this letter refers is Found, ​ ​ ​ ​ which was commissioned in 1853 and which contains a churchyard wall that, true to ROSSETTI AS DISEGNATORE ​

Pre-Raphaelite principles, Rossetti spent days painstakingly painting from nature in the autumn of 1854. (To some extent because painting en plein air was deeply and increasingly uncongenial ​ to Rossetti, Found was the subject of decades of “commissioning, relinquishing, and ​ re-commissioning” [Surtees 1:29, 27] and remained unfinished at his death in 1882.) The reference to Hogarth’s grave in the letter to Allingham may have been a crisp way for the painter to convey to his friend the approximate location of the site in Chiswick just north of the Thames where he was working on Found, but it is also indicative of the presence of Hogarth in his ​ ​ thinking about his “modern picture.” Fredeman has gone so far as to suggest that the phrase “within earshot” in Rossetti’s letter was intended to evoke the epitaph on the monument that was erected above Hogarth’s grave in 1771, a poem by David Garrick that lauds him as a “great Painter of Mankind! … Whose pictur’d Morals charm the Mind, / And through the Eye correct the Heart” (qtd in Correspondence 1:391). In any case, Rossetti was clearly happy to associate ​ his painting with Hogarth, who was renowned as a painter who “took NATURE as his guide” (Ireland 1:1) and as the creator of “pictur’d Morals” that ask to be “read” as “books” because “they have the teeming, fruitful, suggestive meaning of words” (Lamb 2:388). ​ ​ Since it depicts a moment in which rural virtue confronts urban vice—a young drover has encountered the woman to whom he was once engaged working as a prostitute in London—Found can be read as a reprise and reversal of the situation in Plate 1 of Hogarth’s ​ series, where it is not a young drover but the future harlot herself who has arrived in London. “Being still of virtuous character,” Stephens would write of Hogarth’s “young woman” in his Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum (1877), “she wears the dress of a country-girl”: [45] ​

A broad-brimmed hat, trimmed with black ribbons that are tied under her chin, covers a white cap and her neatly arranged hair; a black cord encircles her neck; her bosom is hidden with a white neckerchief; a full-blown rose is placed at her bust; her gown is fitted closely to her body and the latter enclosed in stiff stays; the sleeves of the gown are rolled up to her elbows; her fore arms are covered by long sleeves, which being stiffened, extend to her knuckles; she wears numerous petticoats, quite concealing the contours of her limbs; a long full apron reaches from her waist nearly to the hem of her gown; a small bundle is tied round her right arm, and from her waist hang a pincushion and a pair of scissors … [She] stands with downcast eyes and hands demurely crossed. (3:25)

Her “simplicity of expression” notwithstanding, observes Stephens, “there is a voluptuous character in her features, and a certain frivolity … in her face which Hogarth probably intended should suggest the nature of the woman whom he proposed to depict in the career of a meretrix.” That the young woman is already being solicited by a “procuress” on behalf of “the old man … leering at the maid” from the door of a tavern indicates that she will not be long in embarking on the ill-fated progress that will take her through temporary luxury (Plate 2) to deepening squalor (Plates 3 and 4) and a wretched and untimely death (Plates 5 and 6). ROSSETTI AS DISEGNATORE ​

In Found, the demure dress and demeanor of Hogarth’s country girl have their ​ ​ counterparts in the white smock, neat hair, and clean-shaven face of the young drover, whose expression eloquently bespeaks his pain and sadness as he tries, probably futilely, to pull his erstwhile fiancée up from the street to which she has “sunk under her shame” and away from the grave-yard wall against which she leans her head in a gestural adumbration of her imminent 7 destination unless she changes her ways. As​ might be expected, several aspects of the dress as ​ well as the demeanor of Hogarth’s country girl have inverted parallels in the dress of the prostitute in Rossetti’s work: whereas the former has a “white cap and … neatly arranged hair,” a “white neckerchief” over “her bosom,” “long sleeves … [that] extend to her knuckles,” and “numerous petticoats [that] quite conceal … the contours of her body,” the latter has dishevelled hair, bare arms, and a dress8 that hugs her left thigh and emphasizes the sensuous curve of her ​ left hip (the model for the painting would eventually be Fanny Cornforth, who is frequently supposed to have been herself a prostitute).9 In A Harlot’s Progress, the country girl and her ​ ​ belongings, including a half-dead white goose as a gift for some London cousins, have arrived in a covered wagon. In Found, the equivalent of the goose and the wagon are the “white heifer” ​ 10 ​ (Correspondence 1:285) that​ the young drover is bringing to the market in a cart, but the point ​ ​ is essentially the same: like both the goose and the heifer, the females in both works are meat destined slaughter, a message reinforced in Rossetti’s [46] design by the meshes of the net that ​ prevents the calf from escaping and further reinforced in the unfinished painting by the net-work fringe of the ornate shawl draped around the prostitute’s shoulders. Both Plate 1 of A Harlot’s ​ Progress and the design for Found contain what Stephens calls “a full-blown rose,” but, whereas ​ in Hogarth’s engraving it is “placed at … [the] bust” of the still unfallen girl, in Rossetti’s drawing it is, appropriately, in the gutter near a distinctly phallic stone bollard that tumesces into the partially buried barrel of a cannon in the unfinished painting. One effect of this transformation is to anchor Found more securely in the London of the ​ ​ 1850s and later when heavy cannon taken from the Russians during the Crimean War (1853-56) were apparently installed as bollards or guard posts to protect sidewalks from wagons and other vehicles (as previously had been smaller cannon captured from the French in the battles of Cape Finisterre and Trafalgar).11 While the distinctive stone spans, lamp-standards, and embrasures (or ​ passing-bays) of Robert Mylne’s Blackfriars Bridge in the background of the scene are not in and of themselves further markers of contemporaneity (the bridge was built in the 1760s and demolished in 1863), the setting draws evocatively on the association of the Thames and its bridges with prostitute suicides that was cemented for Victorians by Thomas Hood’s The Bridge ​ of Sighs (1844), where the poem’s protagonist jumps to her death from Waterloo Bridge.12 Many ​ of Rossetti’s contemporaries would also have known, as he most certainly did as a resident of Chatham Place, on the north (City) side of Blackfriars Bridge from 1852 to 1862, that, like Waterloo Bridge, Blackfriars Bridge was not only one of the routes by which “cattle and sheep were driven north to the Smithfield slaughterhouses” (Marsh, Dante Gabriel Rossetti 91), but ​ also one of the routes taken by prostitutes returning to their lodgings on the south (Surrey) side of the river from the dance halls and dining rooms of the Strand, the Haymarket, and the adjoining areas of London’s West End.13 Appropriately for the early morning setting of Found, ​ ​ ​ ROSSETTI AS DISEGNATORE ​ the lamps on the bridge are “still lighted” (Rossetti, Correspondence 2:13)14 and the bridge itself ​ ​ is deserted except, in one of the preparatory drawings, by “a vagrant sleeping in an embrasure … with another figure standing nearby who is perhaps a ‘Peeler’” (Grieve, “Found” 265)—that is, a member of the Metropolitan Police Force established by Sire Robert Peel in 1829.15 If this is ​ indeed the case, then perhaps the two figures are a nascent comment on the failure of the existing English social system to deal effectively with problems such as poverty and prostitution. Be this as it may, in its own way Found was to have been as resolutely “modern” in its contemporary ​ details, allusions, and references as Plate 1 of A Harlot’s Progress, where, as Stephens observes, ​ ​ the background “represents the yard of the ‘Bell’ inn, said to be the tavern of that name in [47] ​ Wood Street, London” (3:25) and the principle characters are based on actual people. There is even a parallel between the black cat on the far right of the picture space in Rossetti’s design for Found and the collapsing pile of “earthen pans” (Stephens 3:26) near the left of the picture space in Hogarth’s Plate 1, for both are significant of impending calamity. The black cat is an object of superstition, however, and in this the design differs significantly from Plate 1 of A Harlot’s Progress, which is conspicuously devoid of elements ​ ​ that suggest the operation of supernatural agency in the prostitute’s impending ill-fortune. Moreover, Christianity is present only as an absence in the Plate: mistaken by Hogarth’s early commentators for the girl’s father (see Ireland 1:4), the “old … gaunt” figure on the horse is, in fact, a clergyman (Stephens 3:26) whose lack of concern for the fate of the girl (as for the conduct of his mount) indicates that religion has opted to ignore rather than confront the evil of prostitution. By contrast, religion is a central and framing presence in Rossetti’s picture: in the very title of the painting there is an allusion to the parables of the “lost” and “found” sheep and prodigal son in Luke 15: across the bottom of the design are words adapted from Jeremiah 2.2 (“I remember thee—the kindness of thy youth, the love of thy betrothal”);16 on a tombstone above ​ the prostitute’s head is a quotation from Luke 15.10 (“There is joy [in the presence of] the angels [of God over] one sinner that [repenteth]”); in the street beside the bollard are two nesting sparrows that not only evoke Matthew 20.29 (“Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father”), but also suggest the domesticity that will be denied to the prostitute unless she changes her ways. (The association of sparrows with Venus may also bring a suggestion of venery to the picture.) Found was conceived in the ​ twilight of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood but it contains an abundance of the “small actualities made vocal of lofty meanings” that William Michael Rossetti regarded as a salient characteristic of Pre-Raphaelite painting and writing—a characteristic that the Pre-Raphaelites also found in a largely secularized form in the work of Hogarth. Although written in 1881 during or after Rossetti’s final attempt to complete Found, the ​ ​ sonnet that he wrote for it also contains an abundance of “small actualities made vocal of lofty meanings.” Deftly using a quotation from Keats’s “Sonnet to Homer” to introduce the floral trope of the discarded rose that he presumably planned to transfer from the design to the painting, the octave of the sonnet alludes as well to Wordsworth’s sonnet “Composed upon Westminster Bridge”17 as it evokes the traditional link between dawn, rebirth, and resurrection ​ and then questions their pertinence in the circumstances depicted: [48] ​ ROSSETTI AS DISEGNATORE ​

“There is a budding morrow in the midnight”:— So sang our Keats, our English nightingale. And here, as lamps across the bridge turn pale In London’s smokeless resurrection-light, Dark breaks to dawn. But o’er the deadly blight Of love deflowered and sorrow of none avail Which makes this man gasp and this woman quail, Can day from darkness ever again take flight? (1-8)

The period in the middle of the fifth line and the inversely parallel sequences of consonants on either side of it (“dark breaks to dawn. But o’er the deadly blight”) stylishly reinforce the turn ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ from the cheeriness of the opening lines of the octave to the doubt that prepares the way for the further questions and concluding despondency of the sestet:

Ah! Gave not these two hearts their mutual pledge Under one mantle sheltered ’neath the hedge In gloaming courtship? And O God! to-day He only knows he holds her;—but what part Can life now take? She cries in her locked heart,— “Leave me—I do not know you—go away!”

No illumination of the sort depicted by Hunt in The Awakening Conscience appears possible in ​ the “locked heart” of the prostitute in the sonnet for Found: her insistence that she no longer ​ ​ loves her fiancé and the imperative rejections of his intervention that surround it (“Leave me … go away!”) indicate that she has not and will not see the light of rebirth and resurrection, an inference that can also be drawn from the fact that in all the studies for the painting and in the painting itself her eyes are firmly shut. To the question of “what part”—that is, what direction—the prostitute’s “life [can] now take” both the sonnet and the painting seem to suggest that, bar a full change of heart, she is destined to follow the trajectory set out by Hogarth in A ​ Harlot’s Progress and, in Stephens’s words, end her life in a “squalid bed-chamber” after “falling into great misfortune” (3:56).

III

“I am reading ‘Wilhelm Meister’ where the hero’s self-culture’ is a great process, amusing and amazing,” Rossetti told William Bell Scott in a letter of 7 May 1853: “on one page he is in despair about some girl he has been the death of—in the next you are delighted with his enlarged views of Hamlet or some other important intellectual item” (Correspondence 1:255-56). Only a ​ [49] fortnight after these references to Goethe’s seminal Bildüngsroman and its famous ​ ROSSETTI AS DISEGNATORE ​ discussions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Rossetti told Walter Deverell that he would “probably ​ ​ paint a Hamlet and Ophelia this year, as a companion to a great modern work” (1:263). Over a year later, in early August 1854 he reported to Allingham that he is “doing … [a design] of Hamlet & Ophelia … deeply symbolic & farsighted, of course,” but doubts that it will be ready ​ in time for inclusion in the current folder of The Folio club,18 and some seven weeks after he ​ ​ reported to the same correspondent that the design is still in progress and will “so treat … [its subject] as … to embody … & symbolize the play without obtrusiveness or interfere with the subject as subject (1:369, 380). No further mention is made of Hamlet and Ophelia in Rossetti’s ​ ​ ​ ​ extant correspondence until 15 February 1859, when he informs Ford Madox Brown that it had been sold for forty guineas (2:246). In 1860, a replica of the drawing was commissioned but apparently not undertaken (see 2:316-17)19 and in 1866 a watercolour was made of the same ​ incident, this being the scene in Shakespeare’s play, where Ophelia returns Hamlet’s “remembrances” (letters, gifts) and he accuses her of being unchaste and wanton (3.i.88-157). 20 ​ By far the most important piece of Rossetti’s correspondence pertaining to Hamlet and ​ Ophelia is a letter of 18 February 1870 to George Eliot in which he explains he explains his intentions in the drawing:

In the Hamlet, I have wished to symbolize the character & situation as well as to represent the incident. Perhaps after all a simpler treatment might have been better. I fear it results in what a good many even sympathetic spectators might find puzzling and intricate. As regards the dramatic action, I have meant to make Hamlet ramping about and talking wildly, kneeling on one of the little stalls and pulling to pieces the roses planted in a box in the angle—hardly knowing all he says and does, as he throws his arms wildly this way and that along the ledge of the carved screen. Ophelia is tired of talking and listens to him, still holding out the letters & presents she wishes to return. (4:371)21 ​

Later in the same day Rossetti characterized these remarks to Barbara Bodichon as a “rather crotchety construction” of the drawing that “half-convinced … [him] that it seems pretentious when put into writing” (4:372). His resolve not to commit the same error again did not endure, however, for in a commentary on Hamlet and Ophelia quoted by Helena M.M. Rossetti (Angeli) ​ in The Life and Work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, he reiterated the substance of his remarks to ​ ​ Eliot and added several important details that can be excerpted in the interests of economy:

1. The setting of the drawing is a “little oratory turning out of the main hall [of [50] the castle,], to which Ophelia has retired with the devotional book which her ​ father gave her to read” (Hamlet 3.i.44).22 ​ ​ ​ 2. “In the woodwork are symbols of rash introspection—the Tree of Knowledge, and the man [Uzzah] who touched the Ark and died.” ROSSETTI AS DISEGNATORE ​

3. “The outer court [at the rear of the picture space] is full of intricate stairs and passages, and leads to the ramparts where the ghost walks at night.” (qtd in Surtees 1:61)

In addition to the details mentioned and glossed by Rossetti, the drawing contains at least two other items of symbolic importance: a crucifix in an alcove of the oratory and carvings of snakes eating their own tails on two of the oratory stalls.23 ​ Before examining further the symbolic details of Hamlet and Ophelia, it is crucial to ​ ​ recall Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, for there is a strong likelihood that all or part of the design’s ​ ​ inspiration came from the “enlarged views” of Hamlet that occupy several portions of Books 4 ​ and 5 of Goethe’s novel. Rossetti’s use of a single “incident” to symbolize the character and situation” of Hamlet and Ophelia may reflect Wilhelm’s conviction, as worded by Thomas Carlyle in his 1824 translation (which is the one that Rossetti read [see Correspondence 1:246]), ​ ​ that an effective performance of the play would be one in which ‘“external relations’”—that is, the means by which “persons … are brought from place to place, or combined … by certain accidental incidents”— are reduced to a minimum in order to focus attention on “the grand internal relations of the persons and events, the powerful effects which arise from the characters and proceedings of the main figures” (1:333-34). More specifically, Rossetti’s conception and representation of Hamlet and Ophelia may reflect Wilhelm’s description of the former as a “solitary young man” in the grip of “trouble and astonishment” who “winds, and turns, and torments himself” and of the latter as a “being” who “crumbles into fragments” when, in the words of Wilhelm’s companion Aurelia and in the very “incident” represented by Rossetti, “all is inverted in the soul of her crazed lover, and the highest turns to the lowest, and instead of the sweet cup of love he offers her the bitter cup of woe” (1:281-38). Could it be that the “great modern work” to which Rossetti envisaged Hamlet and Ophelia “as a companion” in May 1853 ​ is Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre? This is possible, though likelier candidates are his own “modern ​ ​ picture” Found, which has often been seen as a refraction of the theme of imputed sexual ​ ​ impurity and transgression in Hamlet and Ophelia, and even Shakespeare’s play itself, which ​ ​ Goethe’s novel influentially interpreted for generations of Romantics and post-Romantics as the modern psychological drama that Rossetti’s drawing seeks to encapsulate. In his entry on Hamlet and Ophelia in the catalogue of the 1984 Pre-Raphaelite [51] at ​ ​ the Tate Gallery, Grieve describes the “all-over detail” of the drawing as “reminiscent of Dürer prints and Flemish paintings” (“Hamlet and Ophelia” 276).24 Both in its “all-over detail” and in ​ one of its components—the carving of Uzzah (“the man who touched the Ark and died” in 2 Samuel 6.3-7 and 1 Chronicles 7-11)—the drawing is also reminiscent of Hogarth’s A Harlot’s ​ Progress, the second plate of which depicts the harlot as the mistress of a wealthy Jew whose ​ apartment contains two paintings of incidents in the Hebrew Bible: Jonah outside the walls of Nineveh and Uzzah being killed for touching the Ark of the Covenant. Although Rossetti’s drawing contains a carving of the Tree of Knowledge rather than Jonah outside the walls of Nineveh, his explanation of both the Tree of Knowledge and “the man who touched the Ark and died” as “symbols of rash introspection” accords with the significance of the painting of Uzzah ROSSETTI AS DISEGNATORE ​ in Hogarth’s engraving. As Ronald Paulson explains: “the Ark was supposed be carried only by Levites and Uzzah was not a Levite … Uzzah’s error [was] temeritas or rashness, glossed by ​ ​ some biblical commentators as ignorantia” (1:255-56, and see Warner 195n). The fact that ​ ​ Hamlet accuses Ophelia of being a “bawd” (3.iii.111) increases the likelihood that Rossetti had Hogarth’s engraving in mind when he chose to use a depiction of Uzzah as a gloss on Hamlet’s reckless and destructive immersion in his own thoughts. The Tree of Knowledge of the second carving is decidedly and predictably post-lapsarian. Around its trunk is twined “the snake with the human head” that, as John Ruskin observes, “was the universally-accepted symbol of the evil angel, from the dawn of art up to Michelangelo” (Modern Painters 3:207). In the “somewhat late thirteenth-century” illumination that Ruskin ​ uses to illustrate this point, the snake’s body twines upwards and its head is bare (fig. 7 facing 3:208), but in Hamlet and Ophelia it wears a crown in possible reference to Hamlet as the Prince ​ of Denmark and twines downwards in reference perhaps to his mental state (in Ophelia’s words, “a noble mind … o’erthrown … quite, quite down!” [3.iii.158-62]). In loose accordance with Genesis 3.24 (“[God] placed at the east of the garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword … to keep the way of the tree of life”), the Tree is flanked by two angels with upright swords. Between the angels and the Tree, the Latin inscription “ERITIS SICUT DEUS SCIENTES BONUM ET MALUM” may initially seem to be no more than a slightly erroneous transcription of the Vulgate version of the serpent’s final words to Eve (“sicut dii scientes bonum et malum”: ​ ​ “ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” [Genesis 3.5]) whose purpose is merely to identify the Tree as “the tree of knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2.17). The change from the plural dii to the singular deus is deliberate and significant, however, not only because it refers the ​ quotation specifically to Hamlet, but [52] also because it echoes and alludes to Goethe’s Faust, ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ where Mephistopheles, disguised as Faust, inscribes precisely the variant used by Rossetti in the album of the tragedy’s hapless Student as an “ancient proverb” to guide him (1.1725-30). In his “rash introspection” Hamlet is more than a seeker after forbidden knowledge; he has aligned himself with the devil.25 ​ The serpent encircling the Tree is supplemented as a symbol of Hamlet’s psychological condition by the carvings of snakes biting or devouring their own tail on the arms of the stalls in the oratory. No doubt, Rossetti encountered images of the uroboros in a number of places, but the representations of the figure in Hamlet and Ophelia are strongly reminiscent of those in ​ several of the plates in George Wither’s A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Modern, where ​ ​ it is repeatedly glossed as an “expression … / Of Annuall-Revolutions; and of things, / Which ​ ​ wheele about in everlasting-rings; / There ending, where the Round was done” (157; see Bentley, ​ ​ ​ ​ “Anglo-Dutch”). Self-consuming, self-absorbed, self-destroying, circular, and perverse, the uroboros is an apt figure for the involutions and circumvolutions of Hamlet’s mind and thoughts. So, too, are the “intricate stairs and passages” in the “outer court” at the rear of the picture space and literally and metaphorically at the back of Hamlet’s mind.26 The serpentine curves of the ​ ramp to the left of Hamlet’s head and the gloomy tunnel to the right are especially suggestive of his state of mind, as is the absence of any view or vista beyond the ramparts of the castle or through the aperture at the end of a tunnel that appears to be accessible only be ladder from ROSSETTI AS DISEGNATORE ​ below. The echoes of Piranesi’s Carceri (Prisons) are strong, and the overall implication is that ​ ​ ​ Hamlet is trapped in dark and tortuous spaces that are as much or more internal than external.27 A ​ group of soldiers on the platform above Hamlet’s right shoulder recalls the destabilizing and precipitative appearances of the ghost there in the opening act of the play and a bell in a tower at the top right of the picture space suggests the passage of time28 and the havoc and destruction ​ that it will bring. As for Hamlet himself, with his introspective and agonized expression, his arms “throw[n] … along the ledge of the carved screen behind him,” and the palm of his left hand facing the viewer, he bears a distinct and surely deliberate resemblance to Christ on the cross, a parallel confirmed and reinforced by the crucifix in the alcove below his left arm (see Grieve, “Hamlet and Ophelia” 276). The implication that he is suffering a kind of mental crucifixion is clear. Equally clear is the devastating effect that his callous behaviour is having on Ophelia. Modelled by Elizabeth Siddal, she is slumped in her seat with her face turned away from him and her eyes glazed by weariness and sad thoughts. Both the effect on her of Hamlet’s accusations of sexual impropriety and the substance of his accusations are represented in his action of “pulling to pieces [53] the rose planted in a box” on the left of the picture space, for roses are ​ ​ conventionally associated with love, the female, and the Virgin Mary and, as observed earlier, plucked or fallen roses are invariably linked in Rossetti’s work from the early 1850s onwards with fallen women, further cases in point being the various versions of Paolo and Francesco da ​ Rimini in which the trope becomes increasingly prominent (1855, 1862, 1867). The echo of the leaves of the rose bush in the floral pattern of Ophelia’s dress29 and in the carvings of the back of ​ the stall in which she is slumped further reinforce the link between Hamlet’s effect on her and his destruction of the plant. Grieve may well be right in suggesting that Rossetti’s increasingly fraught relationship with Siddal in the 1850s lies in the background of the drawing (276). If not by 1858, then by 1862 when she committed suicide, Siddal could certainly have said with Aurelia as she prepares to play the part of Ophelia in Wilhelm Meister, “One thing … I am too ​ ​ sure of; the feeling that turns … [her] brain I shall not want” (1:343).

IV

Flowers are an even more dominant decorative and symbolic component of Mary Magdalene at ​ the Door of Simon the Pharisee, the depiction of the moment in Luke 7.36-39 when “the woman ​ … which was a sinner,” whom tradition has identified as Mary Magdalene, turns to Christ that Rossetti had “in contemplation” in July 1853 but did not complete until 1858 (Correspondence ​ 1:280; Surtees 1:62-64). In Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee, flowers are as ​ ​ prominent and as freighted with significance as in Hesterna Rosa and Hamlet and Ophelia. At ​ ​ ​ least two of the female revellers in the group from which Mary Magdalene is detaching herself and all but a few of the other revellers, both male and female, wear garlands of flowers in their hair. Moreover, in Rossetti’s words, as she “presse[s] forward up the steps of Simon’s house” Mary Magdalene herself “cast[s] the roses from her hair” (qtd in Surtees 1:62) in an action ROSSETTI AS DISEGNATORE ​ symbolic of her rejection of her sinful way of life. To the left and right of the entrance to Simon’s house are pots of equally symbolic flowers: Easter (or Madonna) lilies signifying sacrifice and purity and sunflowers, whose heliotropic nature helps to alert the viewer to the presence of the sun/Son metaphor in the rays of light that radiate from Christ’s aureole where his head is visible through a window of the house. That the garment worn by Christ is entirely plain sets him apart not only from the revellers, but also from Simon, who “looks disdainfully” at Mary Magdalene (Rossetti, qtd in Surtees 1:62) and wears a garment whose richly patterned sleeve indicates his worldliness and implicates him in the hedonism that she is rejecting. Beside Simon is a male servant “who is setting a dish on the table [and] smiles, [54] knowing her too” ​ (qtd in Surtees 1:62), perhaps because he has “known” her in the biblical sense. Very much as in Rossetti’s illustrations of “St. Cecilia” and “Mariana in the South” in the Moxon edition of Tennyson’s Poems (1857), the background of Mary Magdalene at the Door of ​ ​ Simon the Pharisee is rendered in elaborate detail. In the far distance, a line of hills provides a backdrop to the houses and towers of a town and a stretch of sea or lake dotted with sailing vessels that, like Mary Magdalene, are moving towards the shore and port. In the “high road” (qtd in Surtees 1:62)30 at the end of the street in which the drawings is set men go about their ​ daily lives: a soldier carrying a pike strides along; one man is bent double under the weight of a sack; another goads a heavily-laden donkey with a stick; a man and a woman enjoy the scenery beside a parapet. In the street between Simon’s house and the house in which “a great banquet is [being] held,” a horde of “feasters troop[s] to” the banquet. “Musicians,” one blowing a trumpet and the other strumming a psalter, “play at the door, and [a] couple kiss as they enter,” an action that stands in contrast to Mary Magdalene’s eschewal of sensuality as she moves towards the entrance to Simon’s house. “Near the front of the procession,” that is, the rear of the picture space, “a girl has caught sight of Mary and waves her garland to turn her back,” but otherwise the distant “feasters” are as indifferent to her “sudden … turn[ing] aside at the sight of Christ” as the bystanders in W.H. Auden’s famous poem about Brueghel’s Icarus. As even more vividly ​ ​ attested by the apple-eating soldier at the front of the picture space in “St. Cecelia,” Rossetti was as aware, as Auden believed the “old Masters” to be, that momentous events “take … place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along” (“Musée des Beaux Arts” 3-4)—or, in the case of Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee, ​ ​ trooping towards a “great banquet.” Immediately surrounding Mary Magdalene, however, are people, who, like Simon, are very much aware of her and are reacting accordingly and in accordance with their dispositions. Prominent among these are a threesome of “feasters”—a man and two women—who “have stopped short in wonder and are looking after her, while a beggar girl offers them flowers from her basket” (qtd in Surtees 1:62). The man is handing payment to the beggar girl (whose plain white dress proclaims her innocence and her alignment with Christ), but he is paying no attention to the transaction and looks instead with knit brows and open mouth towards Mary Magdalene. The woman beside him with his arm around her shoulders has a similarly quizzical facial expression but her actions and posture—she is feeling her hair with both hands and has her right arm bent awkwardly across her chest to do this—make her a fetching image of [55] bodily ​ ROSSETTI AS DISEGNATORE ​ self-awareness and concern. Clutching at her friend’s sleeve to get her attention and tilting her head conspiratorially towards her, the second woman seems more knowing and malevolent than surprised or wondering. None of these is a caricature, but the two women are embodiments of the voluptuous and ill-spirited inquisitiveness that are part of the world that Mary Magdalene is leaving behind her as she literally and metaphorically rises above the street and ascends the stairs towards Christ. A thematic and structured echo and inversion of Mary Magdalene’s renunciation can be found in the pair of lovers at the front of the picture space. Set apart from the other feasters by their position in the foreground and on the stairs, the pair are the central component of a triangular structure whose base is the foot of the stairs. At the left and right corners of this pyramid are the beggar girl with her bare back to the viewer and the fawn beneath the window where Christ’s head is seen, and at its apex is the uppermost flower in the man’s garland. But whereas the girl looks upwards towards Mary Magdalene and the head of the fawn is tilted upwards towards Christ, the couple face away from Christ and gaze upward, not at Mary Magdalene, but perhaps at something in the sky or at something or someone in the house in which the banquet is taking place. Mary Magdalene’s eyes and motion direct the viewer towards Christ, but the gaze of the lovers provides no access to a transcendent vision, only a dead end of speculation about what has caught their rapt attention. Sitting as she is with her legs along one of the stairs, the woman is not only making Mary Magdalene’s ascent more difficult; she is also signalling her own choice to remain where she is. Nor is her very ornately dressed31 lover ​ encouraging her to do otherwise. His cupped hands on her knee and foot indicate affection and protectiveness but also possessiveness and restraint. The action of cupping her foot with his hand is unusual enough and so prominently placed (it is almost equidistant between the left and right edges of the drawing) that it leaps into significance as a sensual parody of Mary Magdalene’s imminent washing, drying, kissing, and anointing of Christ’s feet (Luke 7.38). Structurally as well as thematically, the clear and central subject of the drawing is Mary Magdalene, whose identifying jar of ointment is an untraditionally spherical container suspended from her belt and encircled by the handle of a fan, a conventional attribute, as seen in connection with Hesterna Rosa, of coquettes and courtesans. Cast into sharp relief against the darkness of ​ ​ the wall behind and further set off by her floating mane of fair hair, her face is luminously pale and classically beautiful (the model was the actress Ruth Herbert, whose face Rossetti described as having “the most varied and highest expression … [that he] ever saw” [Correspondence ​ 2:214]). At the moment depicted, her head is on the same level as that of the psalter-playing musician [56] in the background, but with her next step up the stairs it will be on a level with the ​ ​ head of Christ towards whom she is thus moving both vertically and horizontally. In Plate 1 of Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress, the future harlot is in the process of choosing a life of vice over a ​ ​ life of virtue and in Found the prostitute seems bent on continuing her way of life, but in Mary ​ ​ Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee, the situation is reversed: as she distances herself ​ horizontally and vertically from her life of vice, Mary Magdalene not only casts its emblematic roses from her hair but, in so doing, forms a cross with arms that are as luminously prominent as her face. If she is indeed the “passionate type” that Eliot saw (372) then hers is a passion that has ROSSETTI AS DISEGNATORE ​ set itself over and against the physical and profane, and yearns to embrace the spiritual and sacred. Her large eyes are directed towards Christ but they are also inward-looking, and most of the lower part of her body is obscured because diminished in importance. Two signifying images at the very front of the picture space bespeak her transition from sinner to future saint: on the left and in allusion to Christ’s expulsion of the devil from the Sycophenician woman’s daughter in Mark 7.25-30, “some fowls gather to share the beggar girl’s dinner” and on the right—and in an allusion both to the “soul that panteth after … God” like “the hart … after the water brook” in Psalm 42.1 and to Christ’s reference to himself as “the true vine” in John 15.1—a “fawn crops the vine on the wall where Christ’s head is seen” (qtd in Surtees 1:62). Mary Magdalene at the ​ Door of Simon the Pharisee was conceived in the year of the dissolution of the P.R.B. and not finished until five years later, yet it bears the deep imprint of the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic, nowhere more obviously than in the “lofty meanings” embedded in such “small actualities” as the chickens and the fawn. That aesthetic is less obviously present in the sonnet for Mary Magdalene at the Door of ​ Simon the Pharisee that Rossetti wrote in 1869 and published in Poems (1870) with a note ​ stating that “in the drawing Mary has left a festal procession, and is ascending by a sudden impulse the steps of the house where she sees Christ. Her Lover has followed her and is trying to turn her back” (276).32 The second part of this statement does not accord with the drawing, or at ​ least with a visible figure in it, but it provides a justification for the octave of the sonnet, which is spoken by Mary Magdalene’s lover and consists of a series of questions and imperatives whose purpose is to dissuade her from what he sees as a ridiculous and abnormal course of action (“foolish freak”). Beginning with a pun on “wilt” in the opening line, the lover’s cajolings are laced with double meanings and literary allusions that bespeak his alignment with death and Satan and, in this way, function in a manner that is parallel to the “small actualities made vocal of lofty meanings” in a Pre-Raphaelite picture. In the second line of the octave, the word “wreath” has funereal connotations [57] (as “garland” would not) and “lips, and cheek” allude to ​ ​ the “rosy lips and cheeks” that Time will destroy in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116. In the fourth line, the lover’s “come thou there” with reference to the “banquet-house” alludes to “Death, lie thou there, by a dead man interred” in Romeo’s final speech (5.iii.87), and finally, his ‘“Till at our ear love’s whispering night shall speak’” alludes to Satan crouching “Squat like a Toad, close to the ear of Eve” to insinuate himself into “The organs of her Fancy” in Paradise Lost (4.800-02): ​ ​

“Why wilt thou cast the roses from thine hair? Nay, be thou all a rose,—wreath, lips, and cheek. Nay, not this house,—that banquet-house we seek; See how they kiss and enter; come thou there. This delicate day of love we two will share Till at our ear love’s whispering night shall speak. What, sweet one,—hold’st thou still the foolish freak? Nay, when I kiss thy feet they’ll leave the stair.” (1-8)

ROSSETTI AS DISEGNATORE ​

“Nay … Nay … Nay”: in an almost comically literal way, the speaker is a nay-sayer intent on counteracting Mary Magdalene’s “impulse” to abandon him in favour of Christ. He is also a skilled and confident sexual manipulator whose seductive wiles Rossetti subtly emphasizes by using clusters of monosyllables to throw into relief the polysyllabic insinuations of “delicate” and “whisperings.” Besides being a testament to the speaker’s sexual self-confidence, the boast and promise of the final line, like the hand cupping the sitting woman’s foot in the drawing, anticipates and parodies Mary Magdalene’s imminent kissing of Christ’s feet. The opening words of Mary Magdalene’s response in the sestet—“Oh loose me!”—leave no doubt of her determination or her passion, which are further emphasized by the repetition “oh!” at the end of the third line and by the reiterated imperative at the end of the final one:

“Oh loose me! See’st thou not my Bridegroom’s face That draws me to Him? For his feet my kiss, My hair, my tears. He craves to-day:—and oh! What words can tell what other day and place Shall see me clasp those blood-stained feet of His? He needs me, calls me, loves me: let me go!” (9-14)

The words “feet,” “kiss,” “hair,” and “tears,” all echo and allude to Luke 7.38, and the phrase of “blood-stained feet” looks further forward to Mary Magdalene’s presence at the crucifixion. The distant future has been at least partly revealed to her but the words needed to describe it and the details of its “day and place” [58] remain unknown. What is certain, however, is Mary ​ ​ Magdalene’s feeling of being pulled and impelled forward, upward, and away from the c(h)arnal life embodied in her lover towards the higher needs, calling, love, and being of Christ.33 As ​ Christ said on another occasion in a passage taken to refer to Mary Magdalene, “But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part [optimam partem elegit], which shall not be taken ​ ​ away from her” (Luke 10.42). Not only does the final emphatic and paratactic line of the sestet—“He needs me, call me, loves me: let me go!”—mimic Mary Magdalene’s ascent of the stairs towards Christ, but, as Kerrison Preston has remarked, it also echoes a line spoken by the Daughter of Urthona to Orc/Christ in Blake’s America: “I know thee, I have found thee, & I will ​ ​ not let thee go” (Preston 63; Blake 196; Plate 2.7). It is quite possible that the final words of the recalcitrant prostitute to her one-time fiancé in Rossetti’s 1881 sonnet for Found—“Leave me—I ​ ​ do not know you—go away!”—were intended to echo and reverse the affirmations of both the Daughter of Urthona and his own Mary Magdalene, and, moreover, to allude ironically to Christ’s command to her after His resurrection: “Noli me tangere” (“Touch me not” [John ​ 20.17]). Thus would “lofty meanings” have accrued to the final line of the sonnet to Found and ​ intertextual resonances enriched the final line of the sonnet to Mary Magdalene at the Door of ​ Simon the Pharisee. ​ Where did Rossetti go artistically after Hamlet and Ophelia and Mary Magdalene at the ​ ​ Door of Simon the Pharisee? In his immediate future lay a miscellany of pictures such as Sir ​ ​ Galahad at the Ruined Chapel (1859), The Salutation of Beatrice (1859), and the resonantly ​ ROSSETTI AS DISEGNATORE ​

Hogarthian Dr Johnson at the Mitre (1860) that suggest a somewhat disconsolate and repetitive ​ casting about for subjects, but then came Bocca Bociata (1859) and the series of single-woman ​ ​ portraits that flowed from it and into The Blue Bower (c. 1863-65), Venus Verticordia (1864-68), ​ ​ and other paintings that veer towards aestheticism and symbolisme. That Rossetti returned to the ​ ​ subject of Hamlet and Ophelia in 1866 and in the previous year or thereabouts produced two ​ paintings based on Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee (see Surtees 1:65 and ​ 110-11) is indicative of the continuing interest in their emotionally-charged and painstakingly rendered subjects that emerges fully again in different registers and media in the late 1860s. Because it depicts a tense and moving incident in a literary work with a wealth of meticulously represented and significant detail, La Pia de’ Tolomei (1868-80) is an obvious descendant of ​ Hamlet and Ophelia and Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee. Less obvious ​ ​ descendants of the two drawings are the sonnets for pictures such as Sibylla Palmifera (1866-70) ​ and Lady Lilith (1864-73) that Rossetti wrote in the late ’60s and the other sonnets of the same ​ period that would soon be [59] included in The House of Life and brought under the aegis of his ​ ​ ​ prefatory Sonnet on the Sonnet, where the sonnet form is famously described as “a moment’s monument” and its practitioners enjoined to attend to its “arduous fullness” (1, 5). It is not fortuitous that the phrase “arduous fullness” occurs in a very late work that is closer in medium and technique to Hesterna Rosa, Hamlet and Ophelia, and Mary Magdalene at ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ the Door of Simon the Pharisee than almost any of the pictures that succeeded them: the pen-and-ink design incorporating the hand-written text of Sonnet on the Sonnet that Rossetti made in 1880 for an anthology of English sonnets and gave to his mother for her eightieth birthday in April of that year. The design depicts a winged female figure labelled “ANIMA” who wears a crown of laurels and strums on a fourteen-stringed harp that hangs from her neck. Framing the text of the Sonnet on the Sonnet is a blossoming rosebush from whose branches, as Rossetti explained to his mother in a letter of 27 April 1880, are suspended representations of the poem’s two tropes for the sonnet:

The Soul is instituting the ‘memorial to one dead deathless hour,’ a ceremony easily affected by placing a winged hour-glass in a rose-bush, at the same time that she touches the fourteen-stringed harp of the Sonnet … On the rose-branches trailing over in the opposite corner is seen hanging the Coin, which is the second symbol used for the Sonnet. Its ‘face’ bears the Soul, expressed in the butterfly; its ‘converse,’ the Serpent of Eternity [that is, the uroboros] enclosing the Alpha and Omega. (Letters 4:1760) ​ ​

Over three decades separate the Sonnet on the Sonnet from the period of Hesterna Rosa, Found, ​ ​ ​ ​ Hamlet and Ophelia, and Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee, but here again are ​ ​ ​ the hallmarks of Rossetti’s work as disegnatore: “small actualities made vocal of lofty ​ ​ meanings,” intellectual intensity combined with meticulous draftsmanship, “arduous fullness.” Perhaps the truest successors of the meticulous and complex pen-and-ink designs of the 1850s are the dense sonnets that Rossetti began to assemble at the same time and would eventually ROSSETTI AS DISEGNATORE ​ publish in The House of Life (1870, 1881), a poem that bears the mark of the disegnatore even in ​ ​ the preliminary nature of the title under which it first appeared: “Sonnets and Songs, towards a Work to be called ‘The House of Life’” (Poems 187). [60] ​ ​ ​

NOTES

1 A​ n 1832 edition of Opere di Giorgio Vasari is listed in Valuable Contents 24 (No. 469). 2 ​ ​ ​ ​ D​ ated 1853, the “first complete design” of Found (Surtees 64B) is a drawing in “pen and ink and ​ brown wash and some Indian ink, and touched with white (the woman’s dress only)” (Surtees 1:29). 3 O​ bserving that “the first sketch for … [Hamlet and Ophelia] evidently once formed part of a ​ ​ larger sheet of paper which also contained an early study for ‘Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon’,” Alastair Grieve notes a couple of the obvious similarities between the two subjects: “Both … concern the dramatic confrontation of a man and a woman and both took several years to reach completion” (“Hamlet and Ophelia” 275). 4 F​ or Rossetti’s acquisition of “a most stunning” and perfectly new” copy of Bonnard, see Correspondence 1:89, and for the date and number of volumes of the edition, see W.M. Rossetti, “Books” ​ and Valuable Contents 24 (No. 471); see also note 36, below 24, for various possible interpretations of the ​ bird pattern on the sleeve of one of the men on the left and on the cloak of one of the lovers in Mary ​ Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee. 5 ​ I​ n the “List of Immortals” that William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Rossetti, and other members of the soon-to-be formed Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood drafted and signed in the summer of 1848, Hogarth appears almost immediately after Fra Angelico and Leonardo da Vinci, albeit without the stars accorded to these and other artists (see Hunt 1.111 and W.M. Rossetti, P.R.B. Journal 107), and, after the ​ dissolution of the Brotherhood in the early 1850s, many of its members and associates continued to foregather and share ideas under the aegis of the Hogarth Club, which was so named by Ford Madox Brown because, according to William Michael Rossetti, he “deeply reverenced … [Hogarth] as the originator of modern invention and drama in modern art” (Some Reminiscences 1:224). (In 1853, Brown ​ ​ wrote a number of what Dante Rossetti dubbed “Hogarthian” sonnets [see Correspondence 1:284] that, ​ unfortunately, do not appear to have survived.) “Hunt regarded the eighteenth-century artist as the founder of a national school of painting,” writes Judith Bronkhurst in the Introduction to her magisterial William Holman Hunt: A Catalogue Raisonné, and he “was greatly influenced by Hogarth’s meshing of ​ realistic, modern life settings with symbolic details that make a moral point” (1:15-16). “The art of Hogarth … [has] been put forward as [a] key influence … in the making of Millais’ Isabella (1848-49), ​ observe Jason Rosenfeld and Alison Smith in their Catalogue of the 2007-08 Millais exhibition at the Tate Britain, and “in representing the pitfalls of romance” in three drawings of 1853 “on the theme of matrimony” he “may have been thinking of … Hogarth’s Marriage-à-la Mode … in the National Gallery” ​ ​ (34, 84). (The three drawings are Married for Rank, Married for Money, and Married for Love.) ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Rosenfeld and Smith also argue apropos the prints on the wall in Millais’ Mrs. James Wyatt Jr and Her ​ Daughter Sarah (1850) that Hogarth may have suggested the “conceit of using pictures within a picture as a form of ironic commentary” (60)—a conceit also used, it may be added, by Hunt in The Awakening ​ Conscience (1853-54), which also owes a thematic debt to Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress and The Lady’s ​ ​ Last Stake (see Bronkhurst 1:166). “I believe colour to be a quite indispensable quality of the highest art,” Rossetti told his patron Francis MacCracken (who had commissioned Found) on 14 May 1854; “the only ​ ​ ​ ROSSETTI AS DISEGNATORE ​ exception which I should be inclined to admit, exists in the works of Hogarth, to which I should never dare to assign any but the very highest place” (Correspondence 1:349). For the engravings by Hogarth ​ that are discussed in this essay, I have relied primarily on Joseph Burke’s and Colin Caldwell’s Hogarth: ​ The Complete Engravings. 6 ​ A​ s Ronald Paulson has shown in compelling detail, several of Hogarth’s works use the classical theme of the Choice of Hercules as a framework for the choice between Virtue and [61] Vice that ​ confront their central characters (see especially 1:271). 7 T​ he reference to the prostitute’s “shame” is from a letter by Rossetti to Hunt on 30 January 1855 that is quoted extensively by Surtees (see 1:28) and by Hunt himself (see 2:2n., and Rossetti, Correspondence 2:13). Rossetti’s description of the physical interaction between the “drover” and the “girl”—“he stands holding her hands as he seized them, half in bewilderment and half guarding her from doing herself a hurt”—points to the psychological complexity that he attempted to embody (the operative word) in the painting. An anticipation of the posture and facial expression of the prostitute can be found in “The Bride’s Prelude” (1849 and later), when the bride, who has had a premarital affair and an illegitimate (and murdered) child with the man to whom she is about to be married, “hid[es] / Her face against the back” of her chair in shame” (86-87)—indeed, the postures and expressions of the bride and her innocent sister in “The Bride’s Prelude” have parallels in several of Rossetti’s pictures of the Pre-Raphaelite period and immediately following. In his letter of 30 January 1855, Rossetti asserts that, while the subject of Found “will be thought … to follow in the wake” of Hunt’s The Awakening ​ ​ Conscience, Hunt himself will know that Rossetti “had long had in view subjects taking the same ​ direction,” a claim that Hunt went to some pains in Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite ​ Brotherhood to refute as part of his effort to establish that he and Millais, not Rossetti, were the prime movers in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 8 I​ n addition to reflecting, like Hesterna Rosa, Rossetti’s consistent association of plucked or ​ ​ fallen flowers and ornate garments with “fallen women” and sexual impurity and plain garments with sexual purity (the latter exemplified by the “robe” of the Blessed Damozel, which “No wrought flowers did adorn,” 7, 8), the fact that the dress of the prostitute in the unfinished painting is pranked with flowers reflects the common belief in the Victorian period and earlier that female vanity and sartorial aspiration on the part of poor women were a primary reason for their resort to prostitution. In London Labour and ​ the London Poor, two volumes of which were in Rossetti’s library at the time of his death (see Valuable ​ ​ Contents 29), Henry Mayhew quotes a passage from an 1835 pamphlet that describes the ornate clothes of a typical prostitute as “the gaudy trappings of her shame” and cites “love of dress and display” as a “chief” cause of “lax morality” in women (4:257, 260). The two volumes of Mayhew’s “Cyclopaedia” that Rossetti owned are likely to have been the two were published in 1851-52 and subsumed into the four-volume edition of 1861-62. 9 T​ his supposition is not supported by the entry on Fanny Cornforth in the new Oxford Dictionary ​ of National Biography; see Christopher Whittick. 10 ​ D​ uring the painting of Found, Rossetti had to settle for a bull calf as a model for the heifer (see ​ ​ Correspondence 1:395; and see 1:401 for the “pony” whose head is visible in the design). 11 ​ P​ eter J. Skilton to whom I am much indebted for information about London’s bollards, observes that the size of the cannon in Found suggests that it could also be based on a British weapon that had ​ failed proving. 12 D​ escribed by Hood as a poem about “Waterloo, and its suicides” (Letters 600) and plangently ​ telling the tale of “One more Unfortunate / Weary of breath / Rashly importunate / Gone to her death! (Selected Poems 317), The Bridge of Sighs was probably part of the inspiration of G.F. Watt’s Found ​ ​ ​ ROSSETTI AS DISEGNATORE ​

Drowned (1848-50), which depicts the body of a prostitute who has committed suicide washed up under ​ Waterloo Bridge (see G.F. Watts, No. 12) and which may be the target of an allusion in the title of Found. ​ ​ ​ ​ Behind the prostitute in Rossetti’s drawings, a flight of stairs leading from the bridge approach down to the river suggests that she too may end her life there. 13 T​ he setting of the painting thus seems to be the south side of the Thames, probably Blackfriars Road. This would be consistent with the orientation of the farmer’s cart, which indicates that he was travelling north towards the markets on that side of the river, and with the prostitute’s position, which suggests that she has crossed the river from London’s wealthy West End to [62] return to one of the “low ​ ​ lodging-houses” in “the Waterloo Road and contiguous streets” that Mayhew identifies as the lodgings of prostitutes who occupy a middle position between kept mistresses (such as the woman in Hunt’s The ​ Awakening Conscience) and the inmates of brothels (4:223, and see 4:213-14). (The drover, Rossetti told ​ Hunt, “has run a little away after a girl who has passed him” [Correspondence 2:13].) It is worth observing, however, that, if the setting of Found is indeed the southwest corner of Blackfriars Bridge ​ looking northeast, then St. Paul’s Cathedral is conspicuous by its absence in the drawings and the painting. It is possible that Rossetti intended to add the Cathedral to the background of the picture, but he may also have intended to omit it in order to signal the absence of religion as a presiding presence in the lives of the prostitute. A third possibility, which is supported by the fact that the wall in the picture was painted in Chiswick, is that the distant background is based on the view from the northeast corner of Blackfriars Bridge (close to where Rossetti had lodgings) looking southwest towards Lambeth. This would certainly be consistent with the low skyline of industrial buildings in the distant background of the drawings and painting and the spritsail barges along the river’s edge. 14 I​ n the unfinished painting, further indication of the early-morning setting is, as Marcia Werner observes, “the glow of blood beneath the skin of the calf’s ears, brought on by the faint morning light behind them” (190). 15 G​ rieve also suggests that the graveyard and the drainage grate in Found reflect contemporary ​ discussions of the pollution and dangers to health stemming from the improper drainage of London’s cemeteries (Art 11-14). 16 ​ ​ I​ n his 30 January 1855 letter to Hunt, Rossetti explained that he is planning to change the “espousals” of the original “‘betrothal’ … as soon as [he has] consulted someone knowing Hebrew” (Correspondence 2:13). ​ 17 ​ W​ ordsworth’s sonnet is set in the early “morning” when the “mighty heart [of London] is lying still” and the sights of the city and the river are “All bright and glittering in the smokeless air” (3:38). In his explanatory notes to the sonnet for Found, Jerome McGann argues that, because it was written very ​ ​ late in Rossetti’s life, it “acquires a singularly personal significance, as it were a commentary on Rossetti’s art in general, which he felt he had prostituted for the sake of worldly success” (qtd in Rossetti, Collected Poetry and Prose 396). 18 ​ A​ short-lived “sketching club” began on 24 February 1854, The Folio consisted of several ​ artists, including Hunt and Millais, who were to place drawings in a circulating folio for criticism by fellow members. For Rossetti’s letter describing the club and such details of it that are known, see Correspondence 1:321-22. 19 ​ O​ n 20 September 1860, Rossetti informed Brown that he had recently been commissioned to make a “pen-&-ink” replica of “Hamlet” (Correspondence 2:316) but Surtees surmises that it was “never ​ begun” (1:80n). ROSSETTI AS DISEGNATORE ​

20 T​ he same scene is also the subject of a watercolour of 1866 (Surtees No. 189) in which Hamlet holds Ophelia’s right hand and she pulls away from him. In the drawing the remembrances are represented by letters and a necklace and in the watercolour by letters and a (jewel) casket. 21 E​ liot replied that “the ‘Hamlet’ seems to me to be perfectly intelligible, and altogether admirable in conception, except in the type of the man’s head,” a caveat that she elaborates in phrenological terms: “I feel sure that ‘Hamlet’ had a square anterior lobe” (372). She also records the response of George Henry Lewes to the drawing: “this conception of yours makes him long to be an actor who has ‘Hamlet’ for one of his parts, that he might carry out this scene according to your idea.” In “Charles Kean’s Hamlet,” a review of Kean’s performance at the Princess’s Theatre on 30 September 1850, Lewes had pronounced Kean’s Hamlet “not wild enough” and “the scene with Ophelia … the best, after the opening ​ scenes, and plainly indicates the heart that is breaking under the harshness” (111, 112, and see 175-76 and 206-15 [63] for Lewes’s reviews of other productions of Hamlet). It is not impossible that Rossetti saw ​ ​ ​ and was affected by one of the productions reviewed by Lewes. 22 I​ n the drawing, the book lies open on Ophelia’s lap beside her left hand, which rests limply beside it, but in the watercolour she holds its pages open where it lies near the “remembrances” on a parapet at the front of the picture space. 23 S​ urtees observes that “the decoration carved on the seat corners”—a stylized Catherine Wheel—“it is the one adopted by the artist for many of his frames” (1:61). 24 T​ he impact of Dürer’s engravings on the combination of painstaking detail and symbolic significance in the work of the Pre-Raphaelites warrants further exploration. In the spring and summer of 1850, a number of Rossetti’s letters make reference to engravings that he has in contemplation, most notably of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” and in a letter that Fredeman dates to February 1851 he writes of an “engagement … consist[ing] of making some drawings on wood” (Correspondence 1: 146-61 and ​ 167). Fredeman identifies two such drawings on wood blocks and reproduces both in A Rossetti Cabinet ​ (No. 71) and dates them c.1851 and c.1851-57 (10). The fact that the earlier of these is an illustration of Albrecht Dürer that was apparently intended as an illustration of Longfellow’s “Nuremberg” (specifically the lines “Here, where Art was still religion, with a simple reverent heart, / Lived and laboured Albrecht Dürer, the Evangelist of Art” (Fredeman, Cabinet 10) is not only consistent with the Pre-Raphaelite credo ​ as expressed by Rossetti in the “Old and New Art” sonnets of 1848-49, but also an indication of the importance of Dürer’s woodcuts and engravings to Rossetti’s practice in these media. When he and Hunt were in Paris in October 1849, they “bought 3 stunning [but, unfortunately, unspecified] etchings by Dürer” and while in Oxford in May 1855 Rossetti went out of his way to show Elizabeth Siddal Dürer’s painting of a “black beetle” (Correspondence 1:115; 2:51). Dürer’s influence has been detected in Mary ​ ​ Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee as well as Hamlet and Ophelia; indeed, Grieve suggests ​ ​ ​ that the composition of the latter—specifically the stairway—“resembles that of Dürer’s ‘Nativity’ in the ‘Small Passion’” (“Mary Magdalene” 284). This suggestion is certainly perceptive, but the architectural setting, populated street, and recessive space of Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee bear ​ a striking resemblance to those of “The Adoration of the Magi” in Dürer’s The Life of the Virgin, which ​ ​ also contains a strong left-to-right “narrative progression across the picture plane” (Strauss 265). Not surprisingly, elements of Rossetti’s illustration to the Moxon edition of Tennyson’s Poems (1857) very ​ evidently derive from woodcuts by Dürer, most notably the pike of the soldier in the foreground of St. ​ Cecilia, which appears to be copied from “Christ before Annas” in The Small Passion, the bird in the ​ ​ ​ foreground of the same illustration, which resembles the doves in several woodcuts, especially “The Annunciation” in The Life of the Virgin, and, most strikingly of all, the sink, cistern, and strap-hinged ​ ​ ROSSETTI AS DISEGNATORE ​ wooden shutters in the background of Mariana in the South, which are based on those in “The Birth of the ​ ​ Virgin” in The Life of the Virgin. 25 ​ ​ W​ erner reads the carving to the left of the panel as “the slender trunk of a branchless tree that bears signs of the beginnings of a new growth” and therefore as a symbol of the “hope of restoration” after a “fall from grace issu[ing] from defiled love” (195-98). Between 1846 and 1848 Rossetti made at least four drawings of scenes in Faust (Surtees Nos. 17, ​ 34, 35, 36) and in May 1850 proposed to Hunt and their fellow Pre-Raphaelites that they produce a series of “etchings” of “Faust … or perhaps Hamlet [which] would be still better, though rather arduous” (Correspondence 1:46). ​ 26 ​ R​ ossetti’s use of the term “ramping” in both of his explanations of Hamlet and Ophelia links ​ Hamlet’s turbulent behaviour with the architectural structures behind him, especially (and the pleonasms seem inevitable) the curved ramps leading to the platform below the ramparts. 27 P​ erhaps the correspondence between Hamlet’s psychological shapes and [64] the physical ​ shapes and spaces of the castle helped to prompt Eliot’s comments on the external representation of inner qualities in her reply to Rossetti’s letter of 18 February 1870 (see Eliot 372 and note 21, above). 28 C​ arved into the arms of the stalls are winged heads that resemble the faces in the background of Sibylla Palmifera (1866-70) and may represent time, fate, or both, as in the subtitle of the second part of the 1881 version of The House of Life: “Change and Fate.” 29 ​ ​ I​ f the flowers on Ophelia’s dress are stylized rosebuds they may signify, in contradistinction to full-blown roses, her virginity. Hamlet’s dark (or, in the words of Carlyle’s translation of Wilhelm ​ Meister, “sable,” 1:351) attire accords with the “inky cloak” of Hamlet 1.ii.77, but Ophelia’s gauzy blouse ​ ​ may have been suggested by Wilhelm’s remark that “decorum, like the thin lawn upon her bosom, cannot hide the soft, still movement of her heart” (1:283). 30 R​ ossetti’s statement that at the rear of the picture space “the narrow street abuts on the high road and the river” does not entirely accord with the drawing (qtd in Surtees 1:62). 31 E​ riko Yamaguchi follows Grieve, noting that “the bird-patterned cloak of the lover” derives from a plate depicting a “Noble Milanais” in Bonnard’s Costumes (vol. 2, number 54) and wonders with ​ Hiroyuki Tanita whether the “bird-patterned costumes … and feather-patterned sleeves on his figures … symbolize their passion or lust” (19, 13, and see 14 for the “Noble Milanais” plate as the source of the pattern on the sleeve of the man on the left in Hesterna Rosa). There can be no doubt that the pattern of ​ ​ the lover’s cloak derives from the cloak in Bonnard’s “Noble Milanais,” but the differences between the decorations of the two garments are also worth remarking and emphasizing: the cloak of the “Noble Milanais” is decorated only with leafy branches and birds, which, moreover, are of indeterminate species, but the cloak of the lover in Rossetti’s design is decorated with hearts and stylized flowers or Catharine wheels as well as leafy branches and birds whose crowns suggest that they may be (immature) peacocks, a traditional emblem of, on the one hand, pride and worldliness and, on the other, resurrection and immortality. If the birds do indeed carry these meanings their presence on the lover’s cloak indicates that the former significances refer to him and their prominence in the design indicates that the latter refer to Mary Magdalene and Christ. 32 T​ he presence of the phrase “turn her back” in Rossetti’s description of the “girl [who] has caught sight of Mary and waves her garland to turn her back” and in his note to the poem raises the intriguing possibility that the “girl” is her “lover.” Nothing about the octave is inconsistent with the reading that this implies, but Mary Magdalene’s “loose me!” and “let me go!” seem to suggest a more proximate lover who, though, absent or invisible in the drawing has been assumed to be male on the basis ROSSETTI AS DISEGNATORE ​ of the fact that the figure with a restraining hand on her shoulder and pulling at her cloak in the most detailed study for the picture is a man (see Surtees No. 109C). 33 I​ n large part because of the resemblance between Christ’s head and an icon, Jerome McGann sees the drawings as “a collision between two styles of representation: a realist style … associated with the street and its extreme pictorial recession, and an iconic style associated with the head of Jesus” and argues that “the word ‘draws’” in the sonnet “shows that this Magdalene is an artistic creature who figures centrally in … [this] argument … about an aesthetic ideal” (Rossetti, Collected Poetry and Prose 393, and ​ see the lengthy discussion of the drawing in McGann’s Rossetti: A Hypermedia Archive). ​ ​

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