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Readers wishing to refer to this essay should use the original place of publication: Bentley, D.M.R. “‘Polysemos, hoc Est Plurium Sensum’: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Paintings of Jane ​ ​ Morris,” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies NS 18 (Spring 2009): 59-80. ​ ​

“POLYSEMOS, HOC EST PLURIUM SENSUM”: DANTE ROSSETTI’S PAINTINGS OF ​ ​ JANE MORRIS

D.M.R. BENTLEY

I

A three-quarter-length figure of a woman in a blue-grey robe almost fills a canvas that is a little less than twice as tall as it is wide (49¼ x 24 inches). Her body faces to the left, but her head is half turned towards the viewer and tilted slightly forward. Her eyes are pensive, her hair is dark and abundant, her skin is pale, flawless, and warm in tone. Her face and hair are framed by a patch of light gray on the dark, plain background and the curve of her neck and shoulder is complemented by a tendril of ivy that hangs downwards towards the back of her left hand, the long fingers and thumb of which hold a pomegranate close to her chest and a little below her chin. A segment of the pomegranate rind has been removed to reveal seeds whose shades of red echo the woman’s lips, which are down-turned. On a gray stone wall at the bottom left of the picture space is a smoking incense-burner with curved handles and a scroll inscribed “DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI RITRASSE NEL CAPODANNO 1874.” On a cartouche at the top right of the picture space is inscribed a Petrarchan sonnet in Italian in which the words “Lungi” and “Proserpina” are give special emphasis. On the base of the painting’s wide gold frame an English version of the sonnet is inscribed on either side of one of the four raised roundels depicting the stylized interior of a pomegranate that are located in the middle of each side of the frame. Beneath the top roundel is a plaque inscribed “PROSERPINA.” This is the version of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Proserpine that is now held by the Tate Gallery.1 It is one of the most ​ ​ ​ recognizably “Rossettian” of Rossetti’s paintings (see Rodgers 42 and Werner 177).2 ​ One reason for this is that the model for Proserpine was Jane Morris, whose [59] striking ​ features also lend distinctiveness to La Pia de’ Tolomei (1868-80), Pandora (1869-71), The ​ ​ ​ Blessed Damozel (1873-79), Astarte Syriaca (1875-77), and several other pictures of Rossetti’s ​ ​ final decade. The fact that Jane Morris modelled for eight paintings and at least two studies of ROSSETTI’S PAINTINGS OF JANE MORRIS

Proserpine between circa 1871 and Rossetti’s death in 1882 has led several scholars to discern a ​ parallel between the subject of the painting and the relationship between its model and artist. “The painting [is] one of which the artist was particularly fond,” observes Virginia Surtees: “the subject of Proserpine bound to bear an analogy to the circumstances of the lives” of Rossetti and Mrs. Morris (1:132). David Rodgers and Marcia Werner agree (42; 177), as very markedly does Russell Ash:

Jane Morris here portrays Proserpine, Empress of Hades, who was confined there with her husband [Pluto] for most of the year because she had tasted one of the fruits of the Underworld, a pomegranate. Rossetti loved this legend, feeling that its theme—a woman granted only occasional periods of freedom from her husband—was analogous to his relationship with his model. (Plate 32)

Perceptive though it unquestionably is and generally accepted as it has now become, the analogical explanation of Rossetti’s fondness for Proserpine/Jane overlooks the possibility that he had additional reasons for being interested in the Proserpine myth during the last decade of his life—the decade in which his thoughts and most of his major works turned on the mysteries of life, love, death, and the afterlife, if any. “Bound to her husband except for a few short periods of escape,” Proserpine certainly was, but with her mother Ceres she is also a central figure in the Eleusinian mysteries of ancient Greece whose adepts received special “benefit” from the “deities” that “extended beyond the grave[:] … they were honoured with the first places in the Elysian fields, while others were left to wallow in perpetual filth and ignominy.” This brief description of the eschatological dimension of the Eleusinian mysteries is taken from the entry entitled “Eleusania” in J. Lemprière’s Bibliotheca Classica: A Classical ​ Dictionary, a volume that Rossetti appears to have relied on for information about classical ​ figures and themes, and certainly did so in the case of Proserpine.3 In addition to providing ​ details of the Eleusinian initiation rituals, which apparently included, among other things, “pomegranates,… ivy-boughs,” and torches dedicated to Ceres” (a possible antecedent of the smoking incense burner in Proserpine), the “Eleusania” entry in editions of Lemprière from the ​ ​ early 1830s onwards was supplemented by information drawn from the work of Karl Otfried Müller, whose History of the Literature of Ancient Greece in the 1858 translation of Sir George ​ Cornwall [60] Lewis and John William Donaldson furnished Rossetti with the basis for “One ​ ​ Girl (A Combination from Sappho)” (1869) in Poems (1870) and provides as good an account as ​ ​ any of the relationship of the Eleusinian and Orphic mysteries to the myth of Proserpine 4 (Persephone) and Ceres (Demeter) :​ ​

Every year, at the time of the harvest, Persephone was supposed to be carried from the world above the dark dominions of the invisible King of Shadows…, but to return every spring, in youthful beauty, in the arms of her mother. It was thus that the ancient Greeks described the disappearance and return of vegetable life in the alternations of the seasons. The changes of nature, however, must have been ROSSETTI’S PAINTINGS OF JANE MORRIS

considered as typifying the changes in the lot of man; otherwise Persephone would have been merely a symbol of the seed committed to the ground, and would not have become the queen of the dead. But when the goddess of inanimate nature had become the queen of the dead, it was a natural analogy which must have early suggested itself, that the return of Persephone to the world of light also denoted a renovation of life and a new birth of men. Hence the Mysteries of Demeter, and ​ ​ especially those celebrated at Eleusis… inspired most elevated and animating hopes with regard to the condition of the soul after death. (1:305-06)

Nor were the prosaic pages of Lemprière and Müller the only or perhaps even the principal channels through which knowledge of the Proserpine myth and Eleusinian mysteries would have come to Rossetti. By no means a P.B. Shelley scholar like his brother, he may nevertheless have known Shelley’s “Song of Proserpine while Gathering Flowers on the Plain of Enna,” a prayerful address to “Mother Earth” as a “Sacred Goddess” from whom “Gods and men, and beasts…,/ Leaf and blade, and bud and blossom” “have birth” (612). In a letter of 6 March 1856, he expressed his admiration of Aubrey de Vere’s The Search after Proserpine: Recollections of ​ Greece and Other Poems (1843) (Correspondence 2:100), the Introduction to which connects the ​ ​ ​ “fable” of Proserpine to “that great mystery of Joy and Grief, of Life and Death, which pressed ​ so heavily on the mind of Pagan Greece, and imparts to the whole of her mythology a profound interest, spiritual as well as philosophical (v-vi).5 Probably before and certainly after the ​ publication of the First Series of Poems and Ballads (1886) he was well acquainted with ​ Swinburne’s “Hymn to Proserpine,” “The Garden of Proserpine,” and “At Eleusis,” the last a retelling of the Eleusinian section (lines 499-562) of Ovid’s account of the Proserpine myth in 6 Fasti (4:417-618). The​ fact that by circa 1866 he had a copy of the Fasti in his library (see W.M. ​ ​ ​ Rossetti, “Books”) suggests that he also had first-hand knowledge of Swinburne’s Ovidian source and raises the possibility that Ceres’ agonized and empathetic cry in the final lines of the Italian and English [61] sonnets for Proserpine—“Oimé per te, Proserpina infelice!” and “Woe’s ​ ​ ​ ​ me for thee, unhappy Proserpine!”—were intended to echo Ceres’ cry when she discovers the loss of her daughter in Fasti: “‘me miseram! Filia,’ dixit ‘ubi es?’” (4:455). Indeed, the “tartareo ​ ​ manto” and “Tartarean grey” of Rossetti’s sonnets may reflect Ovid’s use of “Tartara” as a synecdoche for Hades in Fasti (4:605-08 and 612).7 ​ ​ ​ Walter Pater’s lengthy essay on “The Myth of Demeter and Persephone” (first published in the Fortnightly Review, 1867) appeared too late to influence Rossetti’s initial conception of ​ ​ Proserpine, but it is of very considerable interest here because it points to an ancient statuette ​ that may have helped to determine the position of Proserpine’s left hand and the pomegranate in the painting. The statuette in question comes to the fore when, after drawing the essay towards a conclusion with a prose translation of the Eleusinian section of Fasti 4 and summarizing his ​ ​ discussion of the importance of the myth for “the Greek imagination,” Pater refers to the discovery by Charles Thomas Newton at Cnidus in 1857 of “three statues of the best style of Greek sculpture [that are] now in the British Museum” (136, 140). Following Newton’s account of the unearthing of the three statues in A History of Discoveries at Halicarnassus, Cnidis & ​ ROSSETTI’S PAINTINGS OF JANE MORRIS

Branchidae (1862), Pater identifies two of them as “Demeter enthroned” and “a priestess of Demeter [or] … perhaps … Demeter herself” and the third as an “image of Persephone” whose characteristics he describes in terms that are almost uncannily evocative of Rossetti’s Proserpine: ​

The figure … has the air of a body bound about with grave-clothes; … a certain stiffness in the folds of the drapery, give it something of a hieratic character, and… suggest a sort of kinship with the more chastened kind of Gothic work. But quite of the school of Praxiteles is the general character of the composition; the graceful waving of the hair, the fine shadows of the … face, of the eyes and lips especially, like the shadows of a flower—a flower rising noiselessly from its dwelling in the dust—though still with that fulness or heaviness in the brow … which, … in Greek sculpture, distinguish the infernal deities from their Olympian kindred. The object placed in the hand … is probably the partly consumed pomegranate—one morsel gone; the most usual emblem of Persephone being this mystical fruit, which, because of the multitude of its seeds, was to the Romans a symbol of fecundity. (150)

One of the few aspects of the statue that Pater does not mention is the position of the pomegranate: as is the case in all surviving versions of Proserpine, but not in what is “probably ​ ​ the earliest sketch” of 1871 (Surtees 1:133), it is in Persephone’s raised left hand and next to her chest. Needless to say, this may be as coincidental as the similarities between Pater’s description and Rossetti’s [62] painting, but the possibility nevertheless exists that either in the British ​ ​ Museum or, more likely given Rossetti’s long absences from London in the early 1870s, in the meticulous illustration of it in Newton’s History of Discoveries the Cnidis Persephone helped to ​ ​ determine the placement of the pomegranate in Proserpine. ​ ​ Perhaps because he regarded it as too obvious to require comment, Rossetti made no mention of the sexual symbolism of the pomegranate in any of the letters in which he explains significant elements of Proserpine.8 In the earliest of these (4 October 1873), to his patron ​ ​ ​ Frederick Richards Leyland, he gives a brief account of the Proserpine “legend” and then comments at some length on other aspects of the painting, observing, for example, that “the whole tone of the picture is a graduation of greys—from the watery blue-grey of the dress to the dim hue of the marble, all aiding the ‘Tartarean grey’ which must be the sentiment of the subject.” He also intimates that the “half light[,] half shade” of the “background” reflects the division of Proserpine’s time between the lower and the upper worlds, but adds that this “can … be accounted for on natural grounds” as well “since the opening of a door or window in a dim place with clear light outside would … produce such an effect” (Correspondence 6:284). “The ​ ​ clinging ivy which strays over the wall,” he continues, “further suggests the feeling of Memory which indeed might equally be given as a name to the picture.” Similarly, in later letters to his one-time Pre-Raphaelite Brother Frederic George Stephens and to another patron, William A. Turner, he explains that the painting is “a study in greys” and that it depicts Proserpine ROSSETTI’S PAINTINGS OF JANE MORRIS

in a gloomy corridor of her palace, with the fatal fruit in her hand. As she passes, a gleam strikes on the wall behind her from some inlet suddenly opened, and admitting for a moment the light of the upper world; and she glances furtively towards it, immersed in thought. The incense-burner stands beside her as the attribute of a goddess. The ivy-branch in the background (a decorative appendage to the sonnet inscribed on the label) may be taken as a symbol of clinging memory. (Correspondence 7:67; 477; and see Works 635) ​ ​ ​ ​

As both of these explanations indicate, the “gloom” in which Proserpine is doomed to exist until her return to the upper world is not simply a relative absence of light, but the visual equivalent of a state of profound sadness in which both light and dark are a source of misery—dark because it is an aspect of her current situation and light because it reminds her of the realm from which she is exiled. In Proserpine, “Tartarean grey” is the colour of both melancholy and mourning. ​ ​ This is also apparent in the painting’s accompanying sonnets, where the chant-like repetition of “Afar” (“Lungi” in the Italian version) gives impetus [63] to an elegiac meditation ​ ​ on spatial, temporal, and psychological division and estrangement that finds comfort only in the enduring power of Ceres’ love and empathy:

Afar away the light that brings cold cheer Unto this wall,—one instant and no more Admitted at my distant palace-door. Afar the flowers of Enna from this drear Dire fruit, which, tasted once, must thrall me here. Afar those skies from this Tartarian grey That chills me: and afar, how far away, The nights that shall be from the days that were.

Afar from mine own self I seem, and wing Strange ways in thought, and listen for a sign: And still some heart unto some soul doth pine, (Whose sounds mine inner sense is fain to bring, Continually together murmuring,)— “Woe’s me for thee, unhappy Proserpine!”

The binarisms of “Enna”/“Tartar[us],” “skies”/“grey,” “days”/“night,” and “flowers”/“fruit [pomegranate]” make all the more evident the absence of warmth in a realm to which “light” brings only “cold cheer” and the “clinging memories” signified by the painting’s “ivy-branch” are a source, not of happiness, but of Proserpine’s self-splitting sense of the connection between her consciousness and a realm that is far distant and temporarily unreachable. “Is Memory most ROSSETTI’S PAINTINGS OF JANE MORRIS of miseries miserable, / Or the one flower of ease in bitterest hell?”, Rossetti wondered in 1880 (Works 255). The answer that he gave to Proserpine appears to be the former. ​ ​ Yet there are past and future “flowers,” “skies,” and “days” as well as present miseries in Proserpine’s meditation and, as the smoking “incense-burner … beside her” serves to emphasize, she still has the attribute[s] of a goddess,” including immortality. Enna is a place of perpetual spring; the distant “skies” and past “days” that she recalls are on Mount Olympus as well as on Earth,9 and the “ivy-branch” is not merely “a symbol of clinging memory” and a “decorative ​ appendage to the sonnet” but an evergreen plant, a symbol of (immortal) life and eschatological hope in the midst of death, whose stems and branches echo the tones of her skin and, he told Stephens, the “swaying lines of her drapery” (Correspondence 7:67). In so doing, they reflect the ​ continuity between her and the forces of Nature that lies at the core of the Eleusinian mysteries. In Rossetti’s letters to Stephens and Turner, the patch of light that frames Proserpine’s face is a “gleam,” a word that comes laden with spiritual [64] and mystical associations from at least three ​ ​ poems that would have been well known to Rossetti: Tennyson’s “Two Voices,” where the poet’s voice affirms that “something is or seems, / That touches … [him] with mystic gleams, / Like glimpses of forgotten dreams” (539), Wordsworth’s “Elegiac Stanzas,” where it is “The light that never was, on sea or land, / The consecration, and the Poet’s dream,” and the same poet’s “Intimations Ode,” where “the visionary gleam” is all but synonymous with the “celestial light” that “fade[s] into the light of common day” as the “Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy” (3:259, 279, 281). To the extent that, like Wordsworth’s “Soul,” Proserpine is immortal, retains sustaining memories of the upper real(s) from whence she came, and will eventually and repeatedly be released from her present quasi-posthumous imprisonment and permitted to return to the “light,” Rossetti’s painting invites and sustains a Neoplatonic reading that is fully in accordance with interpretations of the Proserpine myth by, among others, Pater and John Ruskin,10 and fully in keeping with his own highly synergetic and heterodox ​ thinking about the destiny of the soul after death during the final decade and more of his life. “There is nothing dismal or gloomy in the colour & lighting of … [Proserpine],” Rossetti told ​ ​ Leyland in his letter of 4 October 1872; “the whole is meant to have a mystic luminous warmth such as we find in moonlight effects, & I believe I have succeeded.” Growing up as he did under the same roof as the author of the five volumes of Il Mistero ​ dell’Amor Platonico del medio evo derivato dai misteri antichi (1840) and the owner of such ​ works as the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), Rossetti did not want for opportunities to ​ ​ acquire knowledge of Platonism and Neoplatonism. But probably his most important contact with ideas derived from Plato was in the work of Dante, whose conception of Love (Amor) as the motive for spiritual quest and revelation partly derives by way of Boethius, Virgil, and other writers11 from Plato’s account in the Symposium of personal erotic love (Eros) as the first rung on ​ ​ the ladder that leads to wisdom (Sophia). Viewed from a Platonic and Dantean perspective, love and desire for a particular person do not preclude philosophical and spiritual considerations; indeed, they inspire and encourage them: to paint a picture of a beloved and beautiful woman can be more than a pretext for communion and an act of homage: it can be an occasion for philosophical and spiritual enquiry, speculation, and growth. ROSSETTI’S PAINTINGS OF JANE MORRIS

II

The discussion so far has been purposely presented in three stages—a formal description of Proserpine, a brief presentation of the “analogy” between the Proserpine myth and Rossetti’s ​ relationship with Jane Morris, and a lengthy [65] analysis of the painting’s eschatological ​ ​ dimensions—in order to provide a stadial anticipation of the proposition that many if not all of the major works for which Jane and arguably, Elizabeth Siddal served as models respond very fruitfully to a modified version of the four levels of meaning set out by Dante in his well-known letter to Can Grande: the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical (Epistolae 173 and ​ 199).12 If the moral level (which signifies “the conversion of the soul from the sorrow and misery ​ of sin to a state of grace”) is omitted from this scheme as seems appropriate in Rossetti’s case, the three remaining levels correspond well to the three readings of Proserpine proposed here: (1) ​ ​ the painting as merely a depiction of Proserpine at a particular moment in her story; (2) the allegorical or analogical: Proserpine as a representative of Jane Morris in circumstances parallel to her relationship with Rossetti; and (3) Proserpine and her circumstances as components of a pictorial meditation on—to truncate de Vere’s statement in his Introduction to The Search after ​ Proserpine—“that great mystery of Joy and Grief, of Life and Death … [that] imparts to the ​ whole of her mythology a profound interest, spiritual as well as philosophical.” Such pictures as Reverie (1868), Silence (1870), and The Day Dream (1879-80) that ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ merely connect Jane Morris to a mood or phenomenon are unresponsive to the threefold system just proposed, but this is not the case with the major paintings in which she figures or, indeed, with a number of the minor ones. What sets these apart by rendering them more complex is their depiction of figures from either myth or literature whose “story” not only contains elements that parallel Rossetti’s and/or Jane Morris’s situation, but also calls into play the sorts of eschatological issues generated by Proserpine and captured by the titles under which he ​ published sixteen sonnets in the March 1869 number of the Fortnightly Review—“Of Life, Love, ​ ​ and Death”—and later grouped the sonnets that constituted the second part of the 1881 version of The House of Life sequence—“Change and Fate.” ​ ​ Perhaps not fortuitously, the most poignant and arguably the most complex of these, La ​ Pia de’ Tolomei, was begun a year before “Of Life, Love, and Death” was published and was ​ completed a year before the publication of the 1881 version of The House of Life. More ​ ​ precisely, “the head … hands … and probably the body” were painted from Jane Morris between March and July 1868 and then “the canvas … was laid aside and only taken up again in 1880” (Surtees 1:118). In other words (and as confirmed by the chalk studies for the painting that Rossetti made in 1868), the painting’s primary subject-matter—a figure encountered by Dante and Virgil in Canto 5 of the Purgatorio—was conceived in 1868, but the numerous symbolic ​ ​ accessories that crowd the canvas were not added until 1880 and, hence, reflect the stage of Rossetti’s [66] thinking in which “Life, Love, and Death” were subjoined by “Change and Fate.” ​ ​ ROSSETTI’S PAINTINGS OF JANE MORRIS

In a much quoted and paraphrased description of the painting in the 20 February 1881 number of the Athenaeum, Stephens identifies its subject and quotes the translation of La Pia’s ​ ​ words to Dante and Virgil that Rossetti inscribed on the frame:

The subject is taken from the fifth canto of the “Purgatorio,” in which Dante describes his meeting with Pia de’ Tolomei among those whose opportunity of repentance was only at the last moment, and who died without absolution. She had been done to death by her husband, Nello della Pietra, who confined her causelessly in a fortress of the Maremma, where she pined and died of malaria, or, as some say, by poison … A translation of the … lines [that her spirit speaks to Dante] is placed on the frame of the picture:

“Ah! when on earth thy voice again is heard, And thou from the long road hath rested thee (After the second spirit said the third), Sienne, me Maremma, made, unmade, This in his inmost heart well knoweth he With whose fair jewel I was ringed and wed.” (qtd in Surtees 1:119)

In his entry on the painting in The Pre-Raphaelites, Alastair Grieve alludes to Stephens’s ​ ​ description, quotes the last four lines of La Pia’s speech, and then suggests that “Rossetti’s attention may have been drawn to her story by … Pia de’ Tolomei,” “a play by Charles Marenco ​ ​ … which was performed in London in 1856 and 1857” (233). Grieve also observes that “the subject is one of several concerning unhappy marriage which occupied Rossetti at this period [1868-80]” and suggests that “he chose them because they related to the personal life of his main model and inspiration, Jane Morris.” The presence in La Pia de’ Tolomei of the literal and ​ ​ analogical levels of meaning therefore seems plain enough: the painting depicts La Pia at a particular moment in her story—the time of her confinement in the fortress in Maremma—that has a parallel in Jane Morris’s imprisonment in an unhappy marriage. While there is a clear parallel between Jane Morris’s “personal life” and the subject of La ​ Pia de’ Tolomei, the story of La Pia may also have caught Rossetti’s attention in 1868 because of ​ abiding guilt about his treatment of his own wife, who, of course, had taken her own life in February 1862. Credence to this possibility is lent by a version of La Pia’s story with which Rossetti was undoubtedly familiar: that of Charles Bagot Cayley in the annotations to his translation of the Divina Commedia: ​ ​

A Sienese lady named Pia de’ Tolomei was the wife of Nello de’ Panocceschi, [67] a nobleman of the same city, who resided with her at a castle in the ​ Maremma. There, without apparent reason, he one day, while she was standing by a window, suddenly caused his servant to lift her out of it, and drop her, so that ROSSETTI’S PAINTINGS OF JANE MORRIS

she died. His crime was variously attributed to jealousy, merited or unmerited, or the desire of a new alliance, which he appears to have subsequently contracted. (4:144)

The second of Nello’s possible motives would surely have struck an answering chord in Rossetti, whose relationship with Fanny Cornforth and attraction to Jane Morris doubtless contributed to his growing and increasingly devastating estrangement from his wife in the late 1850s and early ’60s. The concluding reference to the “fair jewel [with which she] was ringed and wed” in the last line of La Pia’s speech to Dante may be sufficient to explain its prominence in the painting, but seen in the context of the vexed and vexing marital and sexual relationships of the artist and his model it may also be the most cathected of La Pia/Jane Morris’s symbolic accessories. “Her hands reach along her knees,” Stephens observes; “some of her fingers are interlocked, while one thumb and forefinger clasp tightly, even to the whitening of the nail and knuckle, the ‘fair jewel’ on the other hand” (qtd in Surtees 1:119). As befits the subject, the mood of La Pia de’ Tolomei is sombre and meditative. Shades ​ of grey, green, and brown predominate, and even the ruby of La Pia’s wedding ring is a dull red that appropriately echoes the colours of the “banner of her husband” that lies draped over a nearby parapet (Stephens, qtd in Surtees 1:119). The skin of her hands, face, and neck is pale to the point of sickliness. Her head is tilted forward and her grey-blue eyes stare listlessly and pensively into the distance. Behind her head—psychologically at the back of her mind—a mass of fig leaves suggest by their greenness and their sexual associations a happier past that is also, as it were, behind and in her thoughts. In the circular movement that is generated by the curve of La Pia’s neck, back, and arms, the leaves also lead the eye down to the front and right of the picture space where, as in Proserpine, a branch of ivy “may be taken as a symbol of clinging ​ ​ memory” and—for La Pia’s tale assumed the immortality of the soul—life after death. This in turn helps to lead the eye along the front of the picture space towards the least recondite of the painting’s symbolic accessories: the rosary and devotional book (Stephens says “breviary”) that represent the piety to which La Pia’s name refers. Beneath the book is “a bundle of letters of her husband, written while he was yet her lover” (Stephens, qtd in Surtees 1:119). Along the adjoining parapet and also draped with the banner of La Pia’s husband is a bundle of lances bound together by rope, an emblem of the couple’s lost harmony that probably derives from the “fasces cum securibus” in one or other of the representation of “Concordia” in Cesare Ripa’s [68] Iconologia, a copy of which was in Rossetti’s library circa 1866.13 ​ ​ ​ Adjacent to the bundle of lances at the front and left of the picture space are three symbolic accessories that, more than any other, suggest that the painting is not merely a depiction of a historical and literary character whose circumstances resonated with those of Rossetti and/or Jane Morris. The first of these is a brass sundial signifying vanitas, the gnomon ​ ​ of which is embossed with an angelic figure that faces away from La Pia, appears to be blind-folded, and holds in his hand a wheel whose lower portion is engulfed in flames. Although the angelic figure is anomalous, the combination of indifference, blindness, and the wheel is evocative of Fortuna, the goddess whose “will,” as Virgil explains to Dante in Canto 7 of the ROSSETTI’S PAINTINGS OF JANE MORRIS

Inferno, is “‘conceal’d’” from human beings and whose “‘changes know / None intermission’” ​ (Cary trans. 87-88). Above this image of inscrutable and inexorable “Change and Fate” and beyond the bundle of lances that signifies the irretrievably lost harmony of La Pia and her husband is a bell tower where, to judge by the darkened sky and the startled rooks that are flying away in the distance, the bell is “toll[ing] the knell of parting day” or, in the works of Canto 8 of the Purgatorio from which Thomas Gray’s famous line derives: “se ode squilla di lontano, / che ​ paia il giorno pianger che si muore” (“from afar [the pilgrim] hears the chimes that seem to mourn for the dying day”).”14 Individually and cumulatively the flying rooks, the bell ​ mechanism, and the Wheel of Fortune show—as in a painting they must—motion arrested and time suspended. They also convey a sense of the unstoppable movement of time and events, and, in so doing, identify La Pia’s untimely end and her soul’s presence among the souls of other historical figures who, in Cary’s words, “had deferred their repentance till they were overtaken by a violent death [and], … sufficient space being allowed them, … were then saved” (184). An eschatological dimension is, of course, implicit in the Dantean subject of La Pia de’ Tolomei but ​ the painting’s symbolic accessories ensure that it is read anagogically as a pictorial meditation on the passage of time, the inevitability of death, and the nature of what lies beyond. Since it was begun in 1868 and then set aside until 1880, La Pia de’ Tolomei brackets the ​ great majority of the paintings in which Jane Morris served as a model for a literary or mythological figure that Rossetti apparently chose not only to satisfy contemporary demand for subjects from literature and myth or as analogues for his and Janey’s relationship(s), but also because they reflected his concern with the mysteries and ultimates of human life and death. Proserpine belongs to the period, as do Pandora, The Blessed Damozel, and Astarte Syriaca, all ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ three of which, like Proserpine, gain greatly in analogical significance from the poems of the ​ ​ same titles. The octave of “Pandora (For a Picture)” consists of series of questions that address the [69] motivation and implications of Pandora’s disobedient opening of her casket in terms of ​ ​ human perceptions of the female deities involved in the Judgement of Paris (Juno, Pallas, Wisdom). In the sestet, the sonnet’s opening question—“What of the end, Pandora”—is repeated in an eschatological register:

What of the end? These beat their wings at will, The ill-born things, the good things turned to ill,— Powers of the impassioned hours prohibited. Aye, clench the casket now! Whither they go Thou mayst not dare to think: nor canst thou know If Hope still pent there be alive or dead.

In the painting, Pandora’s casket is decorated with gemstones and inscribed “NASCITUR IGNESCITUR” (“IS NOT KNOWN[,] IS SET ON FIRE”),15 but in a chalk replica of 1878-79 it ​ is decorated with a stylized flower and winged head gazing upwards and inscribed “ULTIMA MANET SPES” (“AT THE LAST REMAINED HOPE”) in reference to the fact that, after ROSSETTI’S PAINTINGS OF JANE MORRIS releasing from her casket the multitude of evils that afflict humanity, she closed it in time to retain Hope. The changes to the decorations and inscriptions on Pandora’s casket are significant for two reasons. First, they reflect the emergence of Hope—a “longing” for the existence and “accomplishment of individual desire after death” (Correspondence 4:413)—as a central ​ component of Rossetti’s eschatological thinking during the period bracketed by La Pia de’ ​ Tolomei. “The One Hope,” which closes the sequence of sonnets in the 1870 version of The ​ ​ House of Life and the entire sonnet sequence in 1881, was written in 1870. “Hope Overtaken” and “Love and Hope” in the 1881 version of the same poem were written in 1871. So too, was “Sunset Wings,” the concluding stanzas of which anticipate both the combination of rooks, bell, and nightfall in La Pia and the juxtaposition of “ULTIMA MANET SPES” with the winged, ​ up-turned head of the 1878-79 Pandora: ​ ​

And now the mustering rooks innumerable Together sail and soar, While for the day’s death, like a tolling knell, Unto the heart they seem to cry, Farewell No more, farewell, no more!

Is Hope not plumed, as ’twere a fiery dart? And oh! thou dying day, Even as thou goest must she too depart, And sorrow fold such pinions on the heart As will not fly away (21-30) [70] ​

In 1874, Rossetti concluded “Untimely Lost,” his sonnet on the untimely death of the young Oliver Madox Brown in November of that year, by asking:

Does he see on and strive on? And may we Late-tottering world-worn hence, find his to be ​ ​ The young strong hand which helps us up the shore? Or, echoing the No More with Nevermore Must Night be ours and his? We hope: and he? (10-14)

Lacking the certitude of faith, Rossetti continued to the end of his life to desire, to search, and to hope for evidence and a belief that life and love exist beyond the grave.16 ​ The second reason that the changes to the decorations and inscriptions on Pandora’s casket are significant is that, in conjunction with the representation of Hope as a figure “with eyes upcast” in Sonnet 1 of the 1881 version of The House of Life (but written in 1871, towards ​ ​ the end of the period in which Hope assumes central importance in Rossetti’s thinking), the emblem-like text-and-image combination on the 1878-79 casket suggests that the winged and ROSSETTI’S PAINTINGS OF JANE MORRIS upward-gazing figures that begin to appear in Rossetti’ painting circa 1870-71 are representations of Hope and, more specifically, “the longing for accomplishments of individual desire after death.” The earliest of these figures appears in Michael Scott’s Wooing (circa ​ 1870-71), a chalk drawing based on James Hogg’s Mary Burnett that depicts its eponymous ​ ​ lover placing a ring on the finger of a woman who resembles Jane Morris, with various other characters from the novel in the foreground and background. Although gazing upwards, the winged figure in this instance is Love, a fact that points to the Dantean lineage of “Hope, with eyes upcast” and to the close affinity between Love and Hope in Rossetti’s thinking. Much the same can be said of the two angelic cupids that attend the Venusian lady in La Bella Mano ​ (1874-81): identified as “Loves” in the accompanying sonnet, both gaze upward, one almost vertically. In The Boat of Love, an unfinished oil illustrating a fanciful sonnet by Dante, Love ​ ​ holds the boat’s tiller and looks up towards Beatrice (who appears to be modelled on Jane Morris) as she prepares to descend into the boat, and in a study for Orpheus and Eurydice ​ (1875), an unfinished drawing that depicts Orpheus still resisting the urge to glance backward at Eurydice with a dejected Proserpine and stern Pluto in the background, two winged figures gaze upwards, perhaps representing the Love and Hope that are soon to be irreparably destroyed. If size is any indication of importance, the most important painting for which Jane Morris sat during Rossetti’s final years is Astarte Syriaca, the massive (72 x 42 inches) oil that he began ​ ​ in 1875 and completed in 1877. [71] Originally entitled Venus Astarte (Letters 3:1426), it is at ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ the literal level a representation of the Semitic goddess of fertility and reproduction who was worshipped by the Syrians, assimilated to the Greek Aphrodite, and linked to Persephone (Proserpine) as well as to Aphrodite (Venus) on account of the affection of all three goddesses for the beautiful young man who is variously named Tammuz, Adon, and Adonis. In keeping with this level, the dominant colour of the painting is green (fertility), the goddess’s lustrous green robe is encircled by cinctures below her breasts and above her hips (reproduction) that she holds with each hand in the pose of the Venus pudica, her two green-robed attendants carry ​ ​ torches that are entwined with a near-eastern vine (Jasminum revolutum), and her head is ​ ​ surmounted by a star in a circle, a traditional symbol of Astarte that signifies the planet Venus. To the extent that Astarte/Persephone/Proserpine were only able to enjoy the love of Tammuz/Adon/Adonis for part of the year, the myths evoked by the painting are analogous to the relationship between Rossetti and Jane Morris, whose erotic power over the artist it embodies on an almost life-size scale. “The symbolism of the picture is certainly related to Rossetti’s love for the sitter,” observes Grieve (“Astarte” 225). Its “unreal lighting, lurid colours and mood of heavy melancholy and longing reflect the claustrophobic atmosphere of their relationship,” suggests Christopher Wood (98). “This [is] Rossetti’s most powerful and emotional tribute to Jane Morris,” adds Russell Ash (Plate 35). Astarte Syriaca may well be the greatest as well as ​ the largest of Rossetti’s paintings of Jane Morris in which she is simultaneously treated in accordance with the characteristics and narrative of a figure in myth and literature and as a reification of herself as an erotic being in relation to the painter. But arguably the most important aspect of Astarte Syriaca is the one that is brought into ​ ​ view by the six lines inscribed on the frame of the painting: ROSSETTI’S PAINTINGS OF JANE MORRIS

Torch-bearing, her sweet ministers compel All thrones of light beyond the light and sea The witness of Beauty’s face to be: The face of Love’s all-penetrative spell Amulet, talisman, and oracle,— Betwixt sun and moon a mystery. (9-14)

“The witness of Beauty’s face to be”: the line refers to the incarnate “Beauty” of Astarte’s face that “All thrones of light” are compelled by her “ministers” to observe and confirm, but it also suggests that there is a “face” of “Beauty” that is yet “to be”—that lies above and beyond what can be seen here. With torches lit to signify burning love, “eyes upcast” to signify transcendent Hope, and green robes and leafy vines to signify regeneration as well as fertility, [72] Astarte’s ​ “ministers” are the votaries of a “love” that is at once Venusian and Dantean, that remains a “mystery” in the diurnal realm of earth, 17 and that makes of the face of the beloved a magical ​ thing with the power to ward off evil, to work wonders for its possessor, and to serve as a guide to the future. In the octave of the sonnet for Astarte Syriaca from which the six lines on its frame ​ are taken, the body of the goddess who is Jane Morris is a site of “commun[ion]” between “earth and heaven” and her neck and face accordingly a combination of the earthly and the heavenly, the sensual and the transcendent, the rhythms of mortal life and emotion and the harmony that cannot be apprehended by mortals: “from her neck’s inclining flower-stem lean / Love-freighted lips and absolute eyes that wean / The pulse of hearts to the spheres’ dominant tune” (6-8). A subject from mythology, a homage to Jane Morris, and a pictorial meditation on life’s “mystery”: Astarte Syriaca is all three, and fully commensurate in complexity and importance with its physical dimensions. Of the paintings that Rossetti executed between the completion of Astarte Syriaca in ​ 1877 and his death in 1882 only one for which Jane Morris was the model is nearly as complex and important: La Donna della Finestra (1879), an oil for which he made studies in 1870 and ​ possibly even a little earlier. At the literal level, the subject of the painting is the young and beautiful lady” who, on the first anniversary of Beatrice’s death, “gaz[es] upon … Dante from a window, with a gaze full of pity, so that the very sum of pity appeared gathered together in her” (Collected Poetry and Prose 286).18 Initially, the Lady at the Window reminds Dante of his “own ​ ​ most noble lady” Beatrice, but “at length … [his] eyes began to be gladdened over much with her company” and he comes to think of her as “one too dear” to him (286-87). The “unwonted condition” of conflict and doubt into which he is thus plunged is cured when, in a sonnet addressed to the Lady at the Window, Dante’s “heart” tells his “soul” to “Be no more at strife / ’Twixt doubt and doubt” because the Lady is “Love’s messenger” and her “gentle eyes” are a source of “strength” and “life” for Love (288-89). In a note to his translation of the Vita Nuova, ​ ​ Rossetti speculates that “the lady of the window” may be Dante’s wife Gemma Donati, whom he married, according to Boccaccio, “about a year after the death of Beatrice … Such a passing conjecture would of course imply an admission of what I believe to lie at the heart of all true ROSSETTI’S PAINTINGS OF JANE MORRIS

Dantesque commentary; that is, the existence always of the actual events even where the allegorical superstructure has been raised by Dante himself” (Collected Poetry and Prose 288n). ​ ​ That a parallel exists between Dante’s relationship with Jane Morris after the death of Elizabeth Siddal (whom he painted as Beatrice in Beata Beatrix [1862-70])19 is too obvious to ​ ​ require more than passing note. [73] That he believed in and wanted accurately to depict the ​ ​ actuality of the Lady and the events surrounding her is evident in La Donna della Finestra, both ​ ​ in the Italianate architectural forms at the rear of the picture space and in the olive tone of Jane Morris’s skin. But does the painting operate on a level beyond and above the literal and analogical? In Dante’s allegorical superstructure,” the Lady at the Window signifies Philosophy, but is this her significance in Rossetti’s painting and, if so, what philosophy? The most prominent symbolic accessories in the painting are the reddish pink roses that frame the Lady’s head and shoulders and echo forward in the picture space to the single rose beneath her hands.20 ​ As well as being traditional attributes of Venus and conventional emblems of Love, these floral attributes help to focus attention on the Lady’s full, red lips and, together with the fig branch and leaves that obscure part of her robe and the wall upon which she leans, to associate her with sensual—indeed, sexual—love. To some degree the Lady’s grey-blue eyes and pensive expression balance this association, as would the “branch of laurel,” an evergreen plant that signifies accomplishments, endurance, and the immortality of the soul, that Rossetti contemplated “introduc[ing] … towards the upper part of the picture” in July 1879 (qtd in Surtees 1:152). In its combination of the bodily and the spiritual, La Donna della Finestra is a ​ pictorial fulfilment of the artistic desire and underlying belief that Rossetti had expressed most succinctly and memorably in 1871 in “Heart’s Hope”: “Lady, I fain would tell how evermore / Thy soul I know not from thy body, nor / Thee from myself, neither our love from God” (House ​ of Life, 5.6-8).21 ​ ​ Only one aspect of the painting suggests an addition to this reading: the expanse of the sky that is visible through the windows behind and to the left and right of the Lady’s head. Devoid of rural or urban landscape features to provide a sense of depth, the sky is cloudy, obscuring, even planar. Like the rectangle of light in Proserpine that it resembles, it suggests an ​ upper world and another existence that can only be glimpsed and imagined. Its equivalent in Rossetti’s poetry is the sky of “The Cloud Confines,” which was also written in 1871, but speaks to the uncertainty about the purpose and direction of human life that in the end separated him from the author of the Vita Nuova and the Divina Commedia. As published in Ballads and ​ ​ ​ ​ Sonnets (1881),22 its final stanza is a crisp statement of the positive agnosticism of Rossetti’s ​ final decade:

The day is dark and the night To him that would search their heart; No lips of cloud that will part Nor morning song in the light: Only, gazing alone, To him wild shadows are shown, [74] ​ ROSSETTI’S PAINTINGS OF JANE MORRIS

Deep under deep unknown And height above unknown height. Still we say as we go,— “Strange to think by the way, Whatever there is to know,” That shall we know one day.” (1-12)

The system of spatial stratifications presented in the central lines of this stanza—“Deep under deep unknown / And height above unknown height”—asks to be read against the descending and ascending structures of the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. In this relation, the opacity of the ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ clouds becomes even more apparent and metaphysical, and their visible and envisaged light-blocking layers a testament to the impossibility of experiencing spiritual enlightenment in the mundane, let alone certainty of the existence of an afterlife.23 The “wild shadows” that are ​ “shown” could be those of Plato’s Cave, but here there is no possibility of egress from the confines of the clouds, only a resigned statement to the effect that the absence of revelation and the agnosticism to which it gives rise are a puzzling and disconcerting oddity: “‘Strange to think by the way, / Whatever there is to know, / That shall we know one day.’” The “absence of morning song” in what light there is below the layers of clouds has a verbal equivalent in the succession of clichés in these lines, which are repeated without variation at the end of all five stanzas of the poem. Perhaps both the absence of light and the verbal flatness of “The Cloud Confines” have a parallel in La Donna della Finestra in the dark walls of the Lady’s chamber ​ whose uniform blankness is emphasized by the ornately decorated terra cotta pillar at the left of the picture space. In his letter to Can Grande, Dante gives “the passing of the sanctified soul from the bondage of the corruption of their world to the liberty of everlasting glory” as the anagogical significance of the text that he uses to illustrate the concept of “polysemos’ (199, 173). Denied ​ ​ the gift of faith as he appears to have been, Rossetti dwelt in uncertainty and in hope making pictures of Jane Morris that simultaneously represent characters from myth and literature, reflect aspects of their fraught relationship, and register his concerns with “Life, Love, … Death,” “Change and Fate.” Stephens was correct in maintaining in “Pictures of Mr. Rossetti” (1875) that “gorgeous, superlative technique,” “splendour of colour and tone, … [and] potent light and ​ ​ shade” are aspects of many of the resulting paintings that “would ensure transcendent success” for the artist (220), and he was no less correct in recognizing other qualities that make them enduringly appealing—the “super-subtle … motives of some,” the “spiritual … inspiration of most,” and the “more purely intellectual elements” of them all. [75] ​

NOTES

1 T​ he other well-known but not so frequently reproduced version of Proserpine (known as the ​ Lowry version because it was once owned by the artist L.S. Lowry) is a little smaller (42 x 22 inches) and ROSSETTI’S PAINTINGS OF JANE MORRIS dated “1877.” See Virginia Surtees’s Catalogue Raisonné, 1:131-34, and Allan Life’s “The Oil Versions ​ ​ of Rossetti’s Proserpine,” 591-604, for inventories of the numerous versions of Proserpine that Rossetti ​ ​ ​ completed or attempted in his final decade. The fact that in a letter of 22 October 1872 to Charles Augustus Howell, Rossetti mentions that he is “working” on a “tall upright drawing” of Jane Morris holding an “apple” that he will “probably” make into “a pomegranate” (Correspondence 5:312, 314) has ​ ​ led scholars to speculate that Proserpine was originally intended to be Eve. In his careful weighing of the ​ evidence surrounding the genesis of Proserpine, Life hypothesizes that, rather than altering an 1871 ​ ​ drawing of Jane Morris as “Eve into a Proserpine after he began exploring the latter theme on canvas,” Rossetti made “two drawings in similar pose” (590). Life also makes the astute point that “the gestural language” of the “Proserpina” drawing of the 1871 “Proserpina” (Surtees No.233A) is “significant, since it is surely more appropriate to this goddess than to Eve” because “a pomegranate would be more likely than an apple to be consumed while being held in the left hand.” 2 S​ ince the growth of interest in the Pre-Raphaelites that began in the mid 1960s, reproductions of Proserpine have appeared on everything from note cards, posters, and shopping bags to the covers of newspaper colour-supplements (Telegraph Sunday, 1984), coffee-table books (Barnes, 1998), and ​ ​ scholarly monographs (Warner, 2005). In order to emphasize the figure and/or face of Proserpine/Jane Morris, the images are frequently cropped so that all or part of the cartouche and incense-burner are omitted. Two obvious consequences of this are a distortion of the painting’s dimensions and a loss of its visual and intellectual complexity. The statement on the cover of the Telegraph Sunday Magazine—“The ​ ​ intriguing story of how the moralist Pre-Raphaelite artists found and shared their models”—points coyly to an aspect of Proserpine that makes it and some other Pre-Raphaelite depictions of women so ​ susceptible to exploitation and reproduction: sex sells. My thanks to Wai Ying Lee for a fine seminar on the commodification of Pre-Raphaelitism. 3 “​ I think I did not mention to you that the subject is Proserpine,” Rossetti told Howells on 1 November 1872; “I enclose extract from Lemprière copied by [Henry Treffry] Dunn. You see the passage ​ about the pomegranate” (Correspondence 5:312). 4 ​ ​ ​ ​ F​ or a brief discussion of the sort of information about the Eleusinian and Orphic mysteries that Rossetti would have found in Müller’s History, see my “Source of D.G. Rossetti’s ‘Combination from ​ ​ Sappho.’” Earlier editions of Lemprière contained information about the Eleusinian mysteries drawn from William Warburton’s The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated (1737-41), which is also a presence in ​ ​ George Stanley Faber’s A Dissertation on the Mysteries of Cabiri (1803) and The Origin of Pagan ​ ​ Idolatry (1816). See Margot K. Louis’s “Proserpine and Pessimism” and “Gods and Mysteries” for fine discussions of the shifts in the study and literary treatment of the Greek mysteries and chthonian deities (Adonis, Dionysus, Persephone) from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. W.M. Rossetti’s list of the books in Rossetti’s library circa 1866 includes another source of information about the Eleusinian mysteries: William Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1844). 5 ​ ​ T​ wo portions of dialogue between Ceres and Hermes in “The Search after Proserpine” find echoes in the English version of the sonnet for Proserpine: Ceres’ “Woe, woe, woe” (in the sonnet, she ​ ​ exclaims “‘Woe’s me for thee, unhappy Proserpine!’”) and Hermes’ description of Proserpine as “sceptered … / In Tartarus” (in the sonnet, she is surrounded by “Tartarean grey”) (de Vere 26, 27; Rossetti, Collected Poetry and Prose 195). De Vere’s gestures towards [76] the Eleusinian mysteries ​ ​ ​ ​ include a reference in the same dialogue to Proserpine as “a Mystery” (27). Among the other poems in de Vere’s volume are a “Sonnet on Titian’s Picture of Bacchus and Ariadne” and a sonnet entitled “Picture of a Saint” (159, 279) that anticipate to a remarkable degree Rossetti’s early sonnets for pictures, the former in its description of Ariadne’s “golden hair, half fallen from the braid” and its concluding question ROSSETTI’S PAINTINGS OF JANE MORRIS of whether Bacchus’s “godlike raptures [will] please her more / Than calm joys her mortal lover gave? and the latter in its description of the saint’s eyes “Searching the centre of the starry sphere” and its concluding image of her “purple robes,” as “stream[ing]” to “earth … / Cyphered with star emblazoned mysteries” (see especially Rossetti’s “For ‘Ruggiero and Angelica’ by Ingres” and “For a Marriage of St. Catherine …” (Collected Poetry and Prose 184, 345). 6 ​ ​ I​ n marked contrast to Rossetti’s sonnet for Proserpine, which, as will be seen, turns in large part ​ ​ on the goddess’s memory of the upper word to which she will return, Swinburne’s “The Garden of Proserpine” and “Hymn to Proserpine” are bleakly nihilistic: in the former, Proserpine “Forgets the earth her mother, / The life of fruits and corn,” and the poem ends by giving thanks to “Whatever gods may be / That no life lives for ever: / That dead men rise up never,” and that death consists of a “sleep eternal / In eternal night”; and the latter is a celebration of “sleep” and “death” that pronounces “ no God … stronger than death,” which is “a sleep” (1:171-72, 67, 73). In an Eleusinian section of Fasti 4, a distraught Ceres ​ renders the land temporarily unproductive in her grief and exercises her powers to cure a dying child named Triptolemus. The Proserpine myth is also recounted by Ovid in Metamorphoses 5:346-661. 7 ​ ​ I​ n her commentary on Fasti 4 in the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics edition, Elaine ​ Fantham notes that “Tartara” and its cognate adjective in these lines “stand for the whole underworld” (206). 8 T​ he striking resemblance between the pomegranate in Proserpine and female genitals is ​ enhanced by the repetition of the colour of its seeds in the goddess’s lips. Rossetti was fully aware of the Christian associations of the pomegranate with Aaron’s priestly robes (see Exodus 28:33-34 and 39:24-26) and with life after death for he evoked these in Giotto Painting the Portrait of Dante (1832), ​ Fra Pace (1856), and Astarte Syriaca. 9 ​ ​ ​ F​ antham notes of Ovid’s “caelum” (Fasti 4:614) that it “must stand for life both on Olympus and ​ above ground among men” (207). 10 I​ n “The Myth of Demeter and Persephone,” Pater contrasts the “mechanical conception” of “changes of the natural world” advanced by “modern science” with “and older and more spiritual, Platonic philosophy” that “envisages nature rather as the unity of a living spirit or person” and consists of “a systematised form of that sort of poetry (we may study it, for instances, either in Shelley or in Wordsworth), which also has its fancies of a spirit of the earth, or of the sky,—a personal intelligence abiding in them” (96). In The Great Initiates: A Study of the Secret History of Religions (1889), Édoaurd ​ Schuré describes the “myth of Ceres and her daughter, Proserpine,” as “the heart of the cult of Eleusis … [and] the symbolic representation of the story of the soul, of its descent into matter, of its sufferings in the darkness of forgetfulness, then of its reascent, its return to divine life” (394). A “spiritual, Platonic philosophy” is also present in Ruskin’s The Queen of the Air: Being a Study of Greek Myths of Cloud and ​ Storm (1869) and Proserpina; Studies of Wayside Flowers, while the Air was yet Pure among the Alps, ​ ​ and in the Scotland and England which My Father Knew (1875, 1886). 11 ​ S​ ee the essays of Margherita De Bonfils Templar and the earlier work of J.A. Mazzeo for the Platonic roots and resonances of Dante’s conception of Love. The key passage in the Symposium is ​ spoken by the wise woman Diotima of Mantinela to the young Socrates, who relates it to his dinner companions. In Benjamin Jowett’s translation, which was first published in 1871 (revised 1875), it reads in small part: “‘Love … is neither mortal nor immortal, but a mean between the two … He is a great spirit [daimon] … and like all great spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal … He interprets … between gods and men, [77] conveying and taking across to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, ​ and to men he commands and replies of the gods; he is the mediator who spans the chasm that divides them, and therefore in him all is bound together … He who would proceed aright in this matter [the ROSSETTI’S PAINTINGS OF JANE MORRIS greater mysteries of Love] should begin in youth to visit beautiful forms; and first, if he be guided by his instructor aright, to love one such form only—out of that he should create fair thoughts; and soon he will of himself perceive that the beauty of one form is akin to the beauty of another; and then if beauty of form in general is his pursuit, how foolish would he be not to recognize that the beauty in every form is one and the same! … He who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, and who has learned to see the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes towards the end will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty … —a nature which in the first place is everlasting … This … is that life above all others which man should live, in the contemplation of beauty absolute’” (1:328, 334, 335). 12 T​ hat Rossetti knew Dante’s letters is apparent from the note in The Early Italian Poets (1861, ​ 1864) in which he refers to “a Latin letter to Cino” being among them (Collected Poetry and Prose ​ 295n.). 13 W​ .M. Rossetti gives the date of his brother’s copy of the Iconologia as 1645 and the title as ​ “Iconologia Ampliata del Cavalier G[io].Z[arantino] Castellini (with Cartari, 1647—Cuts”—i.e., the illustrated 1647 edition of the version published in Venice in 1645 by C. Tomasini (“Books”). La Pia is ​ by no means the only picture for which Jane Morris served as a model that contains symbolic or emblematic images drawn from the illustrations and descriptions in Ripa’s compendium. The ivy of both La Pia and Proserpine may derive from Ripa’s “TENACITA,” the green and greenish garments of ​ Proserpine and Astarte Syriaca may derive from the green dresses of three of the five women in ​ ​ “SPERANZA” and the women in “SPERANZA DELLA FATICHE” and “SPERANZA DIVINA E CERTA,” and the star above the goddess’s head in Astarte Syriaca may derive from the star above the ​ head of the female figure in “ANIMA RAGIONEVOLE E BEATA.” The resemblances between Ripa’s “FELICITA ETERNA,” which shows a woman with a flaming hand gazing upward, and La Donna della ​ Fiamma is striking, as is that between Ripa’s “SILENTIO 2,” which contains a peach with leaves, and Silence (1870). ​14 I​ n Cary’s translation, the lines read: “And pilgrim newly on his road with love / Thrills, if he hear the vesper bell from far, / That seems to mourn the expiring day” (199-201). Cary notes the echo of these lines in Gray’s “The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,” as does Robert Lonsdale in his edition of Gray’s poems (117). 15 T​ he subject(s) of both verbs must be inferred, but together they suggest that the world is being set ablaze by the unknown contents of the casket. 16 “​ No more … Nevermore” alludes to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” a poem that Rossetti illustrated several times in 1846. For a discussion of the central importance of Hope in Rossetti’s thinking from the late 1860s onwards. See my “From Allegory to Indeterminacy.” 17 T​ he fact that behind Venus Astarte the setting sun is in front of the rising moon would suggest that she is located, not on earth, but in the heavens. In view of the Tammuz/Adon/Adonis and Astarte/Persephone/Proserpine connections, it is notable that Adonis parallels Proserpine in ancient celebrations of the fertility and renewal of Nature because, according to one myth, he was turned by Venus into a flower (the anemone) after he was killed by a wild boar and, according to another, he was restored to life by Proserpine on condition that he spend six months of the year with her and the remainder with Venus. 18 B​ efore he turned to the Lady of the Window as a subject, Rossetti planned Monna Vanna ​ (1866), the title of which alludes to Monna or Lady “Giovanna,” the beloved of the Neoplatonic love poet Guido Cavalcanti and, according to the Vita Nuova, a “lady famous for her beauty (see Collected Poetry ​ ​ ​ and Prose 274-75 and 275n. and, for Rossetti’s translation of four poems by Cavalcanti, 293-95). ​ ROSSETTI’S PAINTINGS OF JANE MORRIS

19 A​ s Virginia Surtees observes, Beata Beatrix, though largely painted after Elizabeth Siddal’s ​ ​ death, was conceived sometime earlier (1:93). 20 A​ severed rose branch or flower is a recurring emblem of the fallen woman and transgressive sexuality in Rossetti’s work and may be reflection here on his relationship with Jane Morris or/and Dante’s relationship with the Lady at the Window. 21 “​ Humanly she is the Lady at the Window; mentally she is the Lady of Pity,” writes W.M. Rossetti of La Donna della Fenestra. “This interpenetration of soul and body—this sense of an equal and ​ ​ indefeasible reality of the things symbolized, and of the form which conveys the symbol—the externalism and internalism—are constantly to be understood as the key-note of Rossetti’s aim and performance in art” (Dante Gabriel Rossetti 108). ​ 22 ​ F​ or Rossetti’s revisions and interpretations of the last stanza of “The Cloud Confines” in the period immediately following its composition, see Correspondence (5:106-47). 23 ​ ​ I​ t is possible that Rossetti’s use of clouds in “Cloud Confines” was to some extent shaped by Ruskin’s commentary on “modern cloud-worship” in the chapter “Of Modern Landscape” in Modern ​ Painters 3 (1856). The “cloudiness” of “modern landscape” paintings, he writes, reflects “the easily ​ ​ ​ encouraged doubt, easily excited curiosity, habitual agitation, and delight in the changing and the marvellous” that characterizes the modern mind, and the “darkening of the foreground [of modern paintings] to bring out the white cloud is … a type of the subjection of all plain and positive fact, to what is uncertain and unintelligible” (3:254, 255). 24 S​ everal features of La Donna della Finestra—the screen to the Lady’s left, the aperture behind ​ ​ her, and the pillar in the aperture to her right—recall Portrait of a Lady Known as Smeralda Bandinelli, a ​ ​ half-length painting of a woman in an architectural setting attributed until recently to Sandro Botticelli that Rossetti acquired in 1867 (see Correspondence 3:518) and sold to Constantine Ionides in 1880 (label ​ ​ in the Victoria and Albert Museum). That the sky is free of clouds in Portrait of a Lady Known as ​ Smeralda Bandinelli serves to emphasize its cloudiness in La Donna della Finestra. ​ ​ ​

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