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Rossetti's Bocca Baciata This work has been reproduced on behalf of the author for web publication with minor corrections and formatting changes, and the addition of hyperlinks to images of paintings and illustrations mentioned in the text. Readers wishing to refer to this essay should use the original place of publication: Bentley, D.M.R. “Love for Love: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Bocca Baciata and ‘The Song of the Bower’,” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, NS 12 (Fall 2003): 5-16. ​ ​ LOVE FOR LOVE: DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI’S BOCCA BACIATA AND “THE ​ ​ SONG OF THE BOWER” D.M.R. BENTLEY Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Bocca Baciata (1859) has long been recognized as “a turning point ​ ​ in [his] development as an artist and his final rejection of Pre-Raphaelite teachings and principles” (Rodgers 66). Commissioned by George Boyce and indebted in form and subject to the Venetian bust- and three-quarter-length portraits that Rossetti had come to admire in the wake of Ruskin’s Stones of Venice (1851, 1853) and Modern Painters, volumes 3 and 4 ​ ​ ​ (1856), it depicts Family Cornforth in a state of semi-dishabille against a background or marigolds, holding one of the same flowers in her hand and gazing wistfully off into the distance over the viewer’s left shoulder. Adorning the luxurious auburn hair on one side is a piece of costume jewellery and on the other a white rose. On the parapet to her left is a ripe apple. Bocca Baciata may not be entirely “inscrutable” (Bowness 25) but, taken together, its ​ ​ marigolds—a flower whose name is a compound of (the Virgin) Mary and gold,1 its white ​ rose—a flower that Rossetti had earlier placed on the chaste “robe” of the Blessed Damozel as “Mary’s gift, / For service meetly worn” (Complete Writings 7-12),2 and its ripe apple, ​ ​ which, of course, evokes both the Christian story of the Fall and the classical topos of the Judgement of Paris, send a mixed, even contradictory, message that is only partly clarified by the painting’s title, a phrase taken from a line of Boccaccio that is inscribed on its back: “‘Bocca baciata non perda ventura, anzi rinnova come fa la luna’”: “‘The mouth that has been kissed loses not its freshness; still it renews itself even as does the moon’” (Surtees 1:68). The implication is that sexuality stands outside the nexus of innocence forever corrupted by sinfulness that is evoked by the painting’s Christian allusions. Here indeed is, in David Rodger’s words, a departure not only from the “morally elevating subjects” of Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelite days (66), but also from the “Arthurian and Dantean subjects” of the 3 mid-to-late 1850s (Surtees 1:68). ​ [5] ​ ​ In a letter of 12 February 1860 to one of the most generous patrons of the early Pre-Raphaelites, Thomas Combe, William Holman Hunt minced no words in distancing himself from Bocca Baciata and what it represented: ​ ​ Most people admire it very much and speak to me of it as a triumph of our school … I will not scruple to say that it impresses me as very remarkable in power of execution—but still more remarkable for gross sensuality of a revolting kind … I would not speak so unreservedly of it were it not that I see Rossetti is advocating as a principle mere gratification of the eye and if any LOVE FOR LOVE: ROSSETTI’S BOCCA BACIATA & “THE SONG OF THE BOWER” ​ ​ passion at all—the animal passion [—] to be the aim of Art[.] [F]or my part I disavow any sort of sympathy with such notion. [I]f Art could not do better service than dress up the worst vices in the garb only deserved by innocence and virtue[,] I would give it up today. (qtd. in Surtees 1:69) To the company that Rossetti was keeping in the late ’fifties, however, the “sensuality: of Bocca Baciata was its virtue. “I daresay you have heard of his picture in oils of a stunner with flowers in her hair and marigolds behind it?” enthused Swinburne to William Bell Scott on 10 December 1859: “She is more stunning than can be decently expressed” (Letters 1:27). ​ ​ Such comments suggest that although Bocca Baciata began as a portrait of Fanny Cornforth, ​ it became in the eyes of at least some of its viewers a piece of what today would be called soft pornography. Now the impact of Swinburne and Fanny Cornforth on Rossetti’s ideas about sexuality and its relationship to good and evil may be sufficient to explain the new direction signalled by Bocca Baciata. In the late summer of 1859 when, in Rossetti’s words, the small ​ ​ “half-figure in oil” (Letters 1:358) took on its “rather Venetian aspect” (qtd. in Surtees 1:69), ​ ​ Swinburne’s Ballads and Sonnets (1866) were still in the future, but he had already published ​ an essay on “Church Imperialism” (April 1858) and written a poem and a play—“Queen 4 Yseault” (December 1857) and Rosamond (1840) —that​ both implicitly in their choice of ​ ​ subject and explicitly in their emphasis celebrate the power of female sexuality. And if, as Jan Marsh argues, Rossetti had not fully experienced that power in his long-delayed marriage to Elizabeth Siddal, by 1859 he had surely done so in the arms of Fanny, whose apparent profession had recommended her a year earlier as a suitable model for the prostitute in Found ​ and whose sexuality probably provided the inspiration for the “close bosoms,” “long throes of longing,” “satiate bliss,” and “flagging … pulses” of such poems as “Placatâ Venere” (see Marsh 202-03). In Swinburne and Fanny Cornforth, Rossetti had more than enough iconoclastic support and sexual inspiration to create Bocca Baciata. ​ ​ Yet the painting’s title may point to another factor that contributed to its genesis if, as seems likely, the quotation to which it alludes was taken not, as [6] is usually assumed, ​ directly from Boccaccio but indirectly through another text, namely Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Peter Bell the Third (1819). Described by Swinburne in a later essay on Shelley as “a really humorous and fancifully extravagant improvisation of neither wholly just nor wholly unjust satire (Complete Works 5:338), Peter Bell the Third is an attack on Wordsworth that ​ ​ ​ “target[s] especially … [his] supposed religious cant and metaphysical supernaturalism” and is predicated on the atheistic assumption that “Hell is everyday social hypocrisy” (Jones 50, 49). “Damned since our first parents fell,” Peter Bell/Wordsworth discovers that “Hell is a city much like London—/ A populous and a smoky city” where “There are all sorts of people undone, / And there is little or no fun done” (Poetical Works 2:3, 8). In the poem’s central ​ section, entitled “Sin,” the cause of his damnation is revealed to be a self-centred fearfulness that prevents him from entering the only paradise that exists: … from the first ’twas Peter’s drift To be a kind of moral eunuch: He touched the hem of Nature’s shift,— Felt faint,—and never dared uplift The closest all-concealing tunic. She laughed the while with an arch smile LOVE FOR LOVE: ROSSETTI’S BOCCA BACIATA & “THE SONG OF THE BOWER” ​ ​ And kissed him with a sister’s kiss, And said: “My best Diogenes, I love you well—but, if you please, Tempt not again my deepest bliss. “’Tis you are cold; for I, not coy Yield love for love, frank, warm and true; And Burns, a Scottish peasant boy— His errors prove it—knew my joy More, learned friend, than you. “Bocca baciata non perde ventura, ​ Anzi rinnuova come fa la lune:— ​ So thought Boccaccio, whose sweet words might cure a Male prude, like you, from what you now endure, a Low-tide in soul, like a stagnant laguna.” (Poetical Works 2:13-14) ​ ​ Great poetry this is not, but there can be no doubt that it would have been enjoyed by Rossetti in the late ‘fifties when, encouraged by Swinburne, Fanny Cornforth, and others he was meditating pictorially and in print on the relationships between and among sexuality, morality, prudery, and religion. [7] ​ But can it be said with certainty that at the time of painting Bocca Baciata Rossetti ​ ​ was familiar with Peter Bell the Third? The evidence that he was is circumstantial but ​ ​ compelling. He had known Shelley’s work since he was “about sixteen” (W.M. Rossetti, “Preface” xiv; and see Marsh, Dante Gabriel Rossetti 13, 15), he frequently included ​ quotations from Prometheus Unbound and other works by Shelley in his letters (see, for ​ example, Letters 1:58 and 2:747), and he probably drew part of the inspiration for How They ​ ​ Met Themselves (1851, 1860) from some lines in Shelley’s closet drama (“The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child, / Met his own image walking in the garden, / That apparition, sole of men, he saw” [1:191-93]).5 Moreover, he had in his brother William Michael one of the ​ foremost Shelley scholars of the Victorian period whose two-volume Poetical Works of Percy ​ Bysshe Shelley would appear in 1870 after many years of preparation. In his “Memoir of Shelley” in the Poetical Works, William Michael judges Peter Bell the Third “the most ​ ​ ​ valuable of Shelley’s “poems .. inspired by incidents,” pronouncing it “a chef d’oevre of its ​ kind” that “indicate[s] possibilities of power in … [him] which would have qualified him to descend into the arena of partisan satire, and to sear many doggish foreheads and readily-turned backs with the indelible brand of his scorn … Peter Bell the Third is … a ​ much slighter as well as less finished performance than Byron’s Vision of Judgement; but … ​ ​ it is only inferior, and not very greatly so either, to that burst of Olympian cachinnation, that ever-pointing finger to obloquy” (cxxiv).
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