This 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. “Making an Unfrequented Path of Art His Own: ’s Paintings in the Aesthetic Mode.” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies NS 17 (Spring 2008): 21-35. ​ ​

MAKING AN UNFREQUENTED PATH OF ART HIS OWN: DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI’S PAINTINGS IN THE AESTHETIC MODE

D.M.R. BENTLEY

In a brief article entitled “Mr. Rossetti’s Pictures” in the 21 October 1865 number of the Athenaeum, F.G. Stephens provides analytical descriptions of three recent paintings by Dante ​ Gabriel Rossetti: The Blue Bower (c. 1863-65), Venus Verticordia (1863-68), and The ​ ​ ​ Beloved (1863-66). In doing so, Stephens usefully identifies the characteristics of Rossetti’s single-woman portraits in the emergent Art-for-Art’s-sake tradition and establishes the terms in which they can be discussed and judged:

1: “The scale of the pictures is almost that of life”; 2: They are pictorial equivalents of “lyrical poem[s] [that] aim… at effect quite as much by means of inherent beauty and melodious colouring as by the mere subject, which is superficial”; and 3: “Inasmuch as its subject is defined,” a painting is “somewhat less purely lyrical” than one whose subject is not defined. (545, 546)

On the basis of these characteristics and criteria Stephens pronounces The Blue Bower the ​ most “lyrical” of Rossetti’s three paintings because its subject is least “defined.” The analytical descriptions that support these judgements remain remarkable for their perceptions and insights and cumulatively constitute a model for the appreciation of Rossetti’s paintings in the aesthetic mode. That they are also consistent with the painter’s own aims is apparent from letters written in response to Stephen’s article in which the painter thanks his one-time Pre-Raphaelite brother for “so full and friendly description of … [his] paintings,” declares himself “completely gratified … with all” that the article [21] says about them, and ​ characterizes the descriptions as “praise on the highest grounds” (Correspondence 3:338, ​ 339).1 ​ Although only Venus Verticordia (38 ⅝ x 27 ½ in.) is over three feet in height, all ​ three of the paintings described and analyzed by Stephens accord with his statement that their “scale … is almost that of life,” as do most of his other works in the aesthetic mode inaugurated by The Blue Bower (35 ½ x 27 ¼ in.). Stephen’s recognition of the “scale” of ​ these works is important for two reasons: first, because their life-like dimensions help to differentiate them from the smaller cabinet pieces of the 1860s such as Joli Coeur (1867; 14 ​ ¾ x 11 ⅜ in.) and Fiammetta (1868; 12 ⅞ x 11 ½ in.) whose dimensional lineage lies in ​

MAKING AN UNFREQUENTED PATH OF ART HIS OWN

Bocca Baciata (1859; 13 ¼ x 12 in.) and whose effect is proportionally less decorative; and, second, because his remark points to the face-to-face relationship between the viewer and the women in the paintings that their larger “scale” encourages. These are highly decorative paintings whose “life-size figures” are executed with sufficient “felicity” (Stephens 546) to foster the illusion of actuality and, by doing so, elicit the participation of the viewer, exemplify the appeal of a beautiful woman in beautiful surroundings, and lavishly promote a sense of the desirability of such surroundings. Hung in the public rooms of the houses of their purchasers, such paintings as The Blue Bower would not merely enhance and humanize the ​ decor; they would also bespeak their owners’ aesthetic sensibility and their financial ability to indulge it on an impressive “scale.” In short, they belong squarely in the tradition of bourgeois portraiture that emerged in the early fifteenth century in concert with Renaissance individualism. Not surprisingly, their purchasers tended to be Medicis in small like George Rae and William Blackmore, the former a successful banker and the latter a successful solicitor. Stephens begins his analytical description of The Blue Bower by linking and likening ​ it to the work of “Titian and Giorgione,” who “produced lyrics of this sort in abundance” (and, of course, were greatly admired by Rossetti).2 He then identifies the source of the ​ “appeal to the observer” of “pictures [that] are nothing if not lyrical” as their “poetic spirit” and proclaims The Blue Bower “triumphant” in “its exquisite feeling for colour and delicacy ​ of expression,” these being “qualities” sought by “the master of matters technical … [and] the mind which is habituated to such phases [i.e., aspects] of pictorial power” (545). Even as they prepare the way for the analytical description to come these assertions implicitly situate the painting over and against what it is not—namely, a work in which the “subject” per se is of ​ paramount importance, as would be the case, for example, in a religious, historical, or literary painting, where the figures, expressions, actions, and setting would have been selected to represent a moment in a narrative deemed by the artist to be worthy of pictorial treatment. All of the works that Rossetti painted or wrote during and for some years after the period of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1848-53) [22] were governed by such a deterministic approach,3 ​ ​ ​ but by the mid-1850s with such pieces as The Blue Closet (1857) and The Tune of Seven ​ ​ Towers (1857) he had begun the experiments with indeterminacy and subjectlessness that would lead by way of to The Blue Bower and similar aesthetic works in ​ ​ which, in Stephens’s phrases again, “inherent beauty,” “melodious colouring,” and “poetic spirit” trump “mere subject.” An awareness of this progression as well as of recent controversies surrounding the work of James McNeill Whistler (more of which in a moment) may well lie behind Stephens’s observation that “Rossetti long ago saw … and pursued” a “direction [in which] English Art has not yet ventured far” (545). The first section of Stephens’s analytical description of The Blue Bower focuses on its ​ “technical” and representational aspects in order to allow the reader to envisage the actions, posture, dress, and surroundings of its female figure, who was modelled by . After a near-mechanical emphasis on the position of the figure’s hands and musical instrument, he proceeds to a series of increasingly sensuous references to her “fingers,” “hair,” “lips,” “breath,” “eyes,” “throat,” “bosom,” and “shoulders” that convey a sense of languid and inviting sexuality:

[The painting] represents a lady playing on a dulcimer that lies upon a table; over the strings her fingers stray, eliciting sounds which are now loud, now low, and seem to murmur all about her. The fingers of the left hand retain the sound of the dulcimer, while those of the right, with the thumb, produce the MAKING AN UNFREQUENTED PATH OF ART HIS OWN

music. She listens to the floating sound and accordant notes; to do so easily her hair is removed from the shell of the delightful ear; her lips are just apart, for the escape of the soft breath; her eyes are softly veiled by levelled lids, and seem attending, in perfect unison with the ears. Solid masses of hair, coloured like the inside of a chestnut rind, that is, a greyish, golden brown, with sparks of light, hang dishevelled about her face, heap on her shoulders and pass in abundance to her back; a great pin, or aigrette, of gold, studded with pale turquoises and a sanguine carbuncle, keeps it from before the ear. Her throat is bare; masses of white fur cover the bosom; with this material the whole of her robe is lined; that robe wraps her shoulders, and is of a deep, watery green, bound with black and buttoned with gold. Passion-flowers, whose purple disks are backed by white petals, trail with dark-green leaves on either side of the figure, and are entwined with the paler foliage and bell-shaped flowers of the wild convolvulus. (545)

Bracketed and glossed, as it were, by flowers that, like her “dishevelled” hair and “bare” throat, proclaim her sexuality, the “lady” looks directly and appraisingly at the viewer with her head slightly cocked to one side to reveal the “shell” of her ear and the curve of her jaw and neck. As indicated by several parts of the description, not least the statement that the lady’s “lips are [23] just apart, for the escape of the soft breath” and the statement that “the ​ whole of her robe is lined” with the “white fur” that “cover[s] … [her] bosom,” The Blue ​ Bower is an image whose curves, textures, and openings invite and encourage fantasies about the female body. Background, foreground, costume, and jewellery are all integrally important to the aesthetic appeal of the painting, but the physical beauty and the sheer physicality of the woman at its centre are crucial to its effect and are amplified here, as in Bocca Baciata, by ​ ​ déshabille. Not surprisingly, there is a slightly defensive tone as well as an anticipation of the ​ “Fleshly School” controversy in Stephens’s subsequent description of the lady’s beauty and implied actions and their effect on the viewer: “[She] is beautiful in no common way; but her air more powerful entrances us to sympathy with her act of slowly drawing luxurious music from the strings, so that the eyes and the ear of fancy go together. Then we have the marvellous fleshiness of the flesh; the fascinating sensuousness of the expression, which is refined, if not elevated, by the influence of the music” (546). Robert Buchanan would, of course, see things very differently: “judged by the photographs” that “are sold of … [his] principal paintings,” he writes as he sets his sights on Rossetti in “The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr. D.G. Rossetti,” “he is an artist who conceives unpleasantly, and draws ill” (336). An important component of Stephens’s “technical” description of The Blue Bower is ​ its emphasis on the lady’s jewellery and clothing. As has just been observed, the colours, materials, and (un)fastenings4 of her robe are described in detail and become the stuff of ​ fantasy or “fancy.” The individual components of the “great pin, or aigrette [i.e., spray of jewels],” in her hair are identified and its function specified. No mention is made of her jewelled earring and necklace, but this should not be allowed to detract from the fact that, like the black border of her robe, these intensify the paleness of her skin and the “fleshiness of … [her] flesh.” Taken together, all of these items constitute a poetry of costume whose rhymes and rhythms consist of similar and contrasting colours, shapes, and textures and whose purpose, insofar as it can be educed from their effect, is to enhance and supplement female beauty. To take only a couple of examples: the green gems of the lady’s necklace echo the greyish green of her eyes and the “deep, watery green” of her robe; the red gems echo the reds and pinks of her lips and the “sanguine carbuncle” of her aigrette, the gold and turquoise MAKING AN UNFREQUENTED PATH OF ART HIS OWN colours of which, it may be added, serve through variation and contrast to intensify the “greyish, golden brown” of her abundant hair. As traditionally understood, costume is a marker of historical period, national culture, and social class, but in The Blue Bower dress ​ and jewellery float free of these denotations: instead of serving, in Stephens’s words, “to suggest subject, time, or place,” the shape of a brooch, the hue of a gem, the colour and sheen of a robe either contribute to the design and chromatics or are central to it. They are components of the carefully balanced and [24] visually appealing play of colours, textures, ​ and shapes on and around the lady that, with her as the centrepiece, constitute the painting’s “artistic splendour” (546). When Stephens turns to analyze the “exquisite feeling for colour” that is crucial to that “splendour,” he does so through an extended musical analogy that leaves little, if any, room to doubt that he had in mind Whistler’s recently controversial Symphony in White No. ​ 1: The White Girl (1862) and Symphony in White No. 2: The Little White Girl (1864).5 After a ​ ​ final glance at the “technical”/representational aspect of the painting that includes the resonantly Whistlerian phrase “perfect harmony of white,” the musical analogy effectively becomes the analysis:

The picture derives its name from the background of blue wall-tiles, which, in oriental fashion, line the apartment where the lady is, and are patterned with that perfect harmony of white which is so well understood in the East.6 Beyond ​ this, so indefinite is the work, there is nothing to suggest subject, time, or place. Where we thus leave off, the intellectual and purely artistic splendour of the piece begins to develope [sic] itself. The music of the dulcimer passes out ​ ​ of the spectator’s cognizance when the chromatic harmony takes its place in appealing to the eye. The blue of the wall finds its highest and most powerful key-note in the superb corn-flowers that lie in front of the instrument; the hue of both is echoed by the turquoises of the aigrette. The green and chestnut-auburn, the pallid roses of the flesh, and the firmamental blue of the background, are as ineffable in variety of tint as in their delicious harmony. The green is as deep and almost as translucent as that of the sea when the sun fills it with light. The sharp notes of the picture are in the black of the dulcimer, and that which runs a zigzag on the border of the robe, as well as in what may be called the stridulous accent of the red which is supplied by the tassel of the instrument. More subtle harmonies than the above are indescribable … The wealth, no less than the cunning combination and ample variety of the colour, will delight the student and those who are content to receive a picture in the spirit which is proper to the highest form of Art. (546)

Pleading and finally succumbing to the inadequacy of words, Stephens nevertheless uses his musical analogy with considerable success to credit much of the lyricism and appeal of The ​ Blue Bower to Rossetti’s handling of colour and to suggest that three principal colours at the ​ front of the picture space—the blue “key-note” of the cornflowers, the black “sharp note” of the dulcimer, and the red “stridulous [i.e., harsh] accent” of the tassel—establish the basis and limits of the “chromatic harmony” that gives the painting both variety and unity.7 ​ Not mentioned by Stephens but important components nevertheless of the painting’s combination of variety and unity is the contrast between the geometric shapes and technical treatment of elements at the front and rear of [25] the picture space. As required by their ​ relative proximity to the viewer, the strings, bridges, and rectangular body of the dulcimer are MAKING AN UNFREQUENTED PATH OF ART HIS OWN meticulously rendered and, as required by their relative distance, the decorative designs of the hexagonal blue tiles that give the painting its name are more freely rendered. In both cases, their smooth and geometric forms provide an enhancing contrast to the curves and textures of the lady’s body and clothes. Moreover, their nearly complementary warm and cool colours have a similarly enhancing effect on her hair: the yellow and brown tones of the dulcimer through harmony and the blue and white of the tiles through contrast. In their form, their colours, and their “oriental” associations, the blue tiles of the “bower” that is the painting’s ostensible subject do more than provide an enhancing background for a woman—Fanny Cornforth—who is “beautiful in no common way.” Exotic, artificial, exquisite, and, like the dulcimer, from another place, time, and culture, they define her beauty and her appeal in those very terms, and thus as eternal and universal. Only in Lady before its disastrous ​ repainting8 did Rossetti pay more successful tribute than in The Blue Bower to the seemingly ​ ​ primal allure and power of the woman whose name he implanted in the painting’s “highest and most powerful key-note”: its “superb corn-flowers.” Because it has a mythological “subject” Venus Verticordia contains elements, such as ​ the golden apple of discord, that rely for their effect on “means”—in fact, meanings—other than “inherent beauty and melodious colouring.” Nevertheless, its “colouring … is little inferior to that of ‘The Blue Bower,’” argues Stephens, “and thoroughly in keeping” with Rossetti’s conception of Venus as “victorious and indomitable”—a “winner of hearts … [who] recks not the soul,” who is “more evil than good,” and whose “ways” are “fraught with peril … [and] inscrutable” (546).9 Mentioning but not stressing the “azure” of the bird that ​ flutters in the bower above Venus’s left shoulder and the feathers of the arrow that she holds in her right hand, he dwells on the varieties of yellow and red that reflect her deadly appeal and give unity to the painting. Perhaps recognizing the sexual implications of the pink and tumid roses behind Venus and the crimson cores and curled petals of the honey-suckles in front of her, was famously repelled by the “coarseness” of the flowers in the painting (qtd. in Surtees 1:99). Far from finding the flowers repellant, Stephens appears to have recognized that their resemblance to parts of the female body and vice versa is an aspect ​ ​ of its representation of Venus’s sexuality as a force of nature:

The Idalian10 stands if in a bower of roses and lush honeysuckles that are ​ striped with blood; her figure seems issuing from the latter; the former are heaped in a wilderness of blooms, just as they grow on great trees, and mix their crimsons, blush colour, sickening yellow, and warmest white … About the [26] head of the goddess is a golden halo that issues from her hair; a knot ​ of fluttering butterflies, whose colour resembles that of sulphur, hovers in the rays, dancing an irresolvable dance. That hair is of a tawny brown, and curls in amorous rings upon the low, broad forehead; it sweeps the white shoulders, and party hides the massive bust. In one hand of Venus is the golden apple … [T]he artist … has made Venus rosy of hue, as with an inner glow that mixes with her skin, given her lips of vermilion that are a little parted, and eyes of citrine brown that are veiled, clear as a jewel, but as hard. The long eyelashes are honey-coloured … The true Venusian saffron hue underlies the tint of the goddess; in it the roses of her skin seem to be dusked and become purplish. (546)

That Venus’s “golden apple” both obscures and substitutes for her right breast can be taken as a thematic “key-note” that invites the viewer to recognize other connections between the MAKING AN UNFREQUENTED PATH OF ART HIS OWN forms of the female body and the forms of the natural world.11 It was perhaps with a view to ​ strengthening the connection between female and natural beauty that in 1867 and 1868 Rossetti “completely repainted the figure and head” of Venus Verticordia (Correspondence ​ ​ ​ 4:20) from the woman who would be the presiding genius of his aesthetic works: . “Inasmuch as its subject”—the bride of the Songs of Songs—“is defined,” The ​ Beloved is “somewhat less lyrical” even than Venus Verticordia, though still imbued with the ​ ​ “exquisite feeling for colour and delicacy of expression” that for Stephens are the hallmarks of “pictorial power” in the aesthetic mode (546, 545). “Derived specifically,” he suggests, from the Song of Songs 1.2 (“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine”),12 The Beloved depicts the moment when, “coming near [to the ​ ​ bridegroom, the bride] … draws from before her face, with a graceful action of both hands, the bridal veil of blue and white that was gathered about her head, so that the beautiful countenance is displayed in all its pride of ivory-white” (546). Apparently unfazed by Rossetti’s audacious and Eurocentric decision to make the bride white rather than “black” (Song of Songs 1.5),13 Stephens dwells in his analytical description on the aspects of “colour” ​ and “expression” in the painting that—like the ovoid form of the bride’s withdrawn veil and the less emphatic curves of her hair and necklace—frame and set off her face and neck so that their “swan-like” whiteness is almost thrown into relief. To a remarkable degree he succeeds in capturing and conveying the painting’s ability to place the (male) viewer in the position of the bridegroom and to experience vicariously the sexual desire that comes with the moment when the bride, her face glowing with love and desire, presents herself to him:

The lately-startled blush [of the bride] appears to spread from chin to brow; that brow is crowned by a geranium-coloured and golden aigrette on each [27] ​ temple, which spreads fan-like, and trembles as she moves. Beautiful, and conscious of beauty, she is without the pride of loveliness or the desire for power; the eyes are full of love; the lips are undeveloped roses, rich in life. The subtle rendering of expression, upon which the picture relies for much of its effect, is admirable, and thoroughly original in its tenderness … Her body-robe is of silk, apple-green, of infinite variety in its tints, embroidered with golden and red flowers, to produce a harmony of colouring which assorts in singular felicity with the dark, golden-bronze hue of the skin of one of the attendants—a little negro girl, who stands in front, preceding the lady’s steps. This servant’s black hair and tawny skin form an admirable contrast to the fairness of the bride, the apple-green and the rich sheen of a golden vase wherein she bears the typical roses of the text. (546)

“The typical roses of the text” alludes to the Songs of Songs 2.1 (“I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys”),14 and Stephen’s metaphor of the bride’s lips as “undeveloped ​ roses, rich in life” is an earlier gesture towards the figural and chromatic link between the bride’s beautiful countenance and the servant’s “typical roses.” It is also a reference to her youthfulness (even, perhaps, her virginity), her fertility, and the physical as well as metaphorical connection to natural forms of beauty that is also suggested by her “silk, apple-green” “body-robe” and the accordance between its “embroidered … golden and red flowers” and the pink and yellow roses in the vase and the stems of red lilies and hibiscus that are held aloft by two of her female attendants so that their red blossoms balance the top corners of the picture space. That the bride’s robe is Japanese and her aigrette, according to MAKING AN UNFREQUENTED PATH OF ART HIS OWN

H.C. Marillier, Peruvian (132) indicate that here, as in The Blue Bower, costume is deployed ​ ​ not as an indicator of time, place, and class, but for its aesthetic appeal and effect. Stephens’s blindness or indifference to the racial hierarchy that The Beloved endorses ​ ​ to the point of celebration continues in the description of the “colour[s]” and “expression[s]” of the bride’s female attendants:

Four maidens of diverse tints group themselves behind their chief, and bear branches of trees15 and flowers above her head. With the foliage, these faces ​ form a background to the figure of the bride, and their beauties supply so many foils to her beauty. As she unveils, they look with different expressions for the effect of the disclosure on the coming man; one spies him with archness, a second fixes her regards as if with deeper thoughts than such as merely triumph in the lady’s beauty, a third is gleeful, the fourth seems proudly conscious of her office. (546)

Rossetti intended “the colour of … [The Beloved] to be like jewels” and sought out a black ​ ​ child because “jet would be [an] invaluable” addition to the picture” (qtd. in Surtees 1:105).16 ​ ​ Like semi-precious stones around a cabochon diamond, the role of the “four maidens” is to provide contrasts that set off the [28] centrepiece of the design. The Beloved has a “subject” ​ ​ ​ but this does little (and arguably less than is the case in Venus Verticordia) to detract from its ​ ​ primary raison d’être, which is aesthetic. Adorning the hair of one of the maidens behind the bride is a spiral, pearl brooch of Rossetti’s own design that appears in a number of his more-or-less purely aesthetic works of the late 1860s, including Joli Coeur, Fiammetta, A Christmas Carol (1867), and in the finest ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ of his large-scale works in the aesthetic mode, (1866; 35 x 34 in.). Exquisite in ​ and of itself, this brooch is more than merely ornamental or decorative: its spiral movement from outer to inner curves reflects in small the centripetal movement of the compositions in which it appears and, in doing so, helps to draw the viewer’s eye towards the ravishing hair and face of the female figure at their centre.17 Although readily amenable to an erotic reading ​ on account of the spiralling movement to its whorls towards an inner core that is surmounted by a pearl, it also implies a directionality that is psychological as well as physical. Like the shapes of the flowers that it either accompanies or, in most instances, replaces, it at once enhances and signifies the female body whose desires and desirability are the matrix of the femininity that manifests itself not only in attractive personal adornments, but also in such traditionally feminine behaviours and activities as coquetry, patient devotion, and modest musical accomplishment, at least one of which is given to each of the women in Joli Coeur, ​ ​ Fiammetta, A Christmas Carol, and The Blue Bower. As significant as the presence of the ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ spiral brooch in the first three of these paintings is its absence from the fourth and from other pieces of the late 1860s, such as and Sibylla Palmifera (1866-70)18 that depict ​ ​ ​ female figures who do not conform to conventional Victorian notions of feminine appearance and behaviour. Only in a spirit of irony that is quite alien to his art could Rossetti have possibly placed his veritable emblem of aesthetic femininity in the hair of figures like Lady ​ Lilith whose hold over men stems, paradoxically, from an insouciant attitude to their own ​ beauty and its power. Nowhere does the spiral brooch better fulfil its function as a marker and enhancer of femininity and as an aid to compositional unity and viewer involvement than in Monna ​ Vanna, where it twice adorns the hair of Alexa Wilding, once frontally and once in profile. ​ First mentioned in Rossetti’s extant correspondence as the “picture … with the golden MAKING AN UNFREQUENTED PATH OF ART HIS OWN sleeve” (24 August 1866) and as “Venus Venata” [Venetian Venus] (27 September 1866) ​ ​ ​ ​ (Correspondence 3:463, 472), Monna Vanna is a painting in which costume does serve its ​ ​ ​ traditional purpose as an historical, national, and social marker but is ultimately subordinate, however, to aesthetic effects of colour and design. “It … represents a Venetian lady in a rich dress of white and gold—in short the Venetian ideal of female beauty,” Rossetti told a potential purchaser, the Bradford businessman John Mitchell, in a letter of 27 September 1866; it is “one of my best I [29] believe, and probably the most effective as room decoration ​ which I have ever painted.” Seven years later, while retouching it, he would change its name from Monna Vanna (Lady [Gio] Vanna) to Belcolore because, he explained to Rae (who had ​ ​ ​ purchased it from Blackmore in 1869), Monna Vanna was derived from “13th century ​ ​ sources,19 and quite out of place with such [a] modern looking picture … ‘Belcolore’ is a ​ beautiful Venetian female name, and was the title I originally meant the picture to have, only when done I doubted whether it quite deserved the name of ‘Fair Colour.’ I think now there will be no misnomer” (Correspondence 6:339). Just how finely tuned are the colour and ​ ​ design of Monna Vanna (as it continues to be known) can be gauged from Rossetti’s response ​ to a request from Rae’s wife concerning the Lady’s rings: “I only one that seemed objectionable, and this I removed. The ring on the left hand is an exact copy from a mediaeval one which I have—that on the right looks big, it is true, but the decided green was required to balance the colours of the picture. View it as a beryl or emerald matrix, and it is not exaggerated” (Correspondence 6:349). Aesthetic integrity was a quality that in this ​ instance Rossetti would not compromise to suit the preferences of his wealthy middle-class patrons and their wives. The “beryl or emerald matrix” is, in fact, a brilliantly chosen and positioned compositional element that serves at least two purposes. As Rossetti’s comments to Rae indicate, its “decided green” “balance[s]” the colour of the two rosettes on the shoulder of the lady’s gown and, with these, forms a triangle with her dark eyes. In addition, its curved right edge echoes in miniature the curves of her massive, pillowy sleeve and her feathered fan, which are in turn echoed by the outline of her hair, the folds and pattern of her sleeve, and the spiral of her pearl broach, which itself echoes the curves, spirals, and closed, unclosed, and overlapping circles and ovals that echo and intersect one another in almost every part of the painting. The result is a swirling and rhythmic unity of form that is more modern than Rossetti could have realized.20 No less virtuosic is what Stephens would call the “melodious ​ colouring” and “chromatic harmony” of Monna Vanna. Gaining in intensity from their white ​ ​ background, the golds and browns of the stylized floral design on the lady’s sleeve are echoed by the golds of her bracelet, necklace, and flower-shaped earring, as well as by the gold setting of her mediaeval ring, the stone of which picks up the coral tones of her bead necklace.21 In a similar way, the darker, earthy browns of the sleeve are echoed by the colour ​ of her hair and by the colour of parts of her fan, the very dark striations of which balance the rosettes on her shoulder. The centripetal heart of the painting towards which all its colours and forms insistently and repeatedly draw and return the viewer’s eye is the lady’s face—the dark eyes, crimson lips, and pale, pink-toned skin that Rossetti further emphasizes by placing her against a background whose darkness is relieved only by a vase of pink and white roses. [30] Nor does Monna Vanna lack the element of psychological “expression” that Stephens ​ ​ finds in Rossetti’s large-scale paintings in the aesthetic mode. Several aspects of the painting combine with the lady’s pose and expression to produce a degree of emotional nuance that complements but does not compromise its essential appeal. In the hand of a coquette or a courtesan, a fan can serve the purposes of flirtation and seduction by tantalizingly concealing MAKING AN UNFREQUENTED PATH OF ART HIS OWN and revealing parts of the face, neck, and chest.22 Here it retains its sexual associations, but ​ rests on or near the lady’s right shoulder as she toys distractedly with her coral-coloured necklace. Instead of coyly or forthrightly engaging the viewer, she gazes into the distance with a pensive and fed-up expression in her eyes and face. Despite or perhaps because of her beauty and finery, she is nonchalant, distant, and seemingly resigned to the tedium of being an opulently dressed object of admiration and desire.23 To be idolized and decorative, Monna ​ ​ Vanna as a whole suggests, is to be bored to distraction. This does not detract at all, of course, from the beauty and brilliance of a painting that, had Stephens seen it in 1865, would surely have been included in his summary praise in “Mr. Rossetti’s Pictures” for “the remarkable power of the painter who has dealt with life-size figures with much felicity, and produced original and subtle combinations of colour” in pictures that “show him in the rare character of an original designer of merit, who has made an unfrequented path of Art his own” (546). A sense of boredom with the aesthetic mode may also have descended on Rossetti himself in the late ’60s. During and after the completion of Monna Vanna late in 1866 he ​ produced a number of smaller, less elaborately designed, and more quickly executed paintings of women such as Fiammetta and Joli Coeur, and he did not paint another ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ large-scale work in the aesthetic mode until Veronica Veronese (1872) and La Ghirlandata ​ ​ (1873), both of which were modelled by Alexa Wilding. In the interim, two large-scale works, La Mandolita (1869) and Woman with a Fan (1870), were not worked up from ​ ​ drawings into paintings and Rossetti’s time and energy were focussed on Sibylla Palmifera, ​ ​ Lady Lilith, La Pia de’ Tolomei (1868, 1880), and other works that treat subjects that are rich ​ in spiritual, intellectual, and personal significance. In 1870, the spiral brooch puts in its final appearance in , an illustration of the plaintive song “Take, O, take those lips away” ​ ​ at the beginning of Act 4 of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure that reminds Mariana of her ​ lover’s broken promise of marriage. It now graces the hair of , however, and seems to draw the viewer into the thoughts whose sadness is registered in her eyes with an empathy born of the personal relationship that, from the late 1860s onwards, became crucial to Rossetti’s choice of literary and mythical subjects that are anything but “superficial.” [31] ​

NOTES

1 F​ rom the fact that Stephens saw the paintings in Rossetti’s studio (see “Mr. Rossetti’s Pictures” 545) and almost certainly in his company, it can be inferred that at least in some places the essay contains ideas expressed by the painter. 2 R​ ossetti’s “For a Venetian Pastoral by Giorgione” (1849) was inspired by a Fête champêtre ​ in the Louvre that is now attributed to Titian, and Titian’s half-and-three-quarter-length portraits of women, a number of which were reproduced as engravings (and, by the 1850s, photographs) lie centrally in the background of his paintings of women from Bocca Baciata onwards. See ​ Correspondence 3:189-90 for Rossetti’s part in September 1864 in procuring Henri Fantin-Latour to make copies of paintings by Giorgione and Titian for Lady Ashburton and Correspondence 4:103 for ​ his admiration in September 1868 of a Titian portrait on exhibition in Leeds. Possibly seminal to Rossetti’s paintings of women in the Venetian mode is the half-length portrait by Titian in the Louvre that was known in the nineteenth century as Titian and His Mistress and greatly admired for its ​ gradations of colour (see Burnet Part 3, Plate 7, figs. 2 and 57). It depicts a woman attending to her hair while a man holds a mirror in front and behind her so that she can see the effect, a scenario with resonances in Rossetti’s Fazio’s Mistress (1863), Woman Combing Her Hair (1864), and Lady Lilith ​ ​ ​ (1864-68). MAKING AN UNFREQUENTED PATH OF ART HIS OWN

3 A​ s puts it, “at the beginning [we] set ourselves to illustrate themes we conscientiously persuaded ourselves to be connected with the pathetic, the honest, the laudable, and the sublime” (2:361). 4 S​ tephens’s description of the robe as “buttoned with gold” elides the fact that its buttons are undone so as to reveal the white fur, which is in turn parted to reveal some skin and, in the nature of décolletage, to tantalize by partial revelation. The overall effect of dishevelment and déshabille in The ​ ​ ​ Blue Bower is reminiscent of Bocca Baciata, which was also modelled by Fanny Cornforth. 5 ​ ​ ​ I​ n 1860, Whistler exhibited At the Piano and The Coast of Brittany: Alone with the Tide ​ ​ without controversy. Hunt describes the former as “a striking example of frank manipulation and of wholesome though not exhaustive colour” (2:294) and Rossetti regarded the latter as “a work really quite unsurpassed in many qualities both of truth & pure colour” (Correspondence 3:37). 6 ​ ​ R​ ossetti’s friendship with Whistler began to become close early in 1863 and was at its peak in 1864 and 1865 when they dined together on several occasions and enjoyed a sometimes intense rivalry over the collection of blue china (see Correspondence 3:27, 118, 148, 209, 230, 286, 332, and ​ elsewhere). 7 I​ n his Discourse, the bête noir of the Pre-Raphaelites, Sir Joshua Reynolds, draws a firm line ​ between poetry and painting, regarding the former as greatly superior to the latter in its power to engage the passions and move the mind; however, this distinction between “warm” and “cold” colours and his application of it to the work of Titian and others has resonances in Stephens’s analysis and, indeed, in Rossetti’s painting: “I must take this opportunity of mentioning one of the means of producing that great effect which we observe in the works of the Venetian painters … It ought, in my opinion, to be indispensably observed, that the masses of light in a picture be always of a warm mellow colour, yellow, red, or a yellowish-white; and that the blue, the grey, or the green colours be kept almost entirely out of their masses, and be used only to support and set off these warm colours; and for this purpose, a small portion of cold colours will be sufficient … [L]et the light be cold, and the surrounding colours warm … and it will be out of the power of art, even in the hands of Rubens or Titian, to make a picture splendid and harmonious … The conduct of Titian in the picture of Bacchus and Ariadne [in the National Gallery, London] has been much celebrated, and justly, for the harmony of the colouring. To Ariadne is given (say the critics) a red scarf, to relieve the figure from the sea, which is behind her. It is not for that reason alone, but for another of much greater [32] consequence; ​ for the sake of the general harmony and effect of the picture” (1:208-10). 8 T​ he repainting of Lady Lilith took place in 1872-73 and involved the substitution of Alexa ​ Wilding’s head for that of Fanny Cornforth (see Surtees 1:116). The photograph reproduced in the second volume of Rossetti’s Poems (1904) facing page 134 gives a sense of the picture before it was ​ repainted. 9 I​ t is not impossible that Stephens’s description of Venus Verticordia lies in the background ​ of Walter Pater’s famous description of the Mona Lisa in “Leonardo da Vinci,” which was first published in the Fortnightly Review in November 1869. “She appears to be a Venus after Chaucer’s ​ heart,” runs another part of Stephens’s description (which also mobilizes the Pre-Raphaelite metanarrative of the rise and decline of Western art), “not the grave mother of the grand Greek school, still less a small meretrix like the Venus de’ Medici, or the pert women of the late French Renaissance, but one of the true Renaissance, that glorious Indian summer when Art halted awhile before it fell completely” (546). 10 I​ dalium on the island of Cyprus was sacred to Venus/Aphrodite. 11 A​ s is the case with The Blue Bower, objects at the front of the picture space in Venus ​ ​ ​ Verticordia in 1865 it was “not quite finished.” 12 ​ T​ he frame of The Beloved is inscribed with an amalgam and adaption of the Song of Songs ​ 1.2 and 2.16 and Psalm 45.14: “My beloved is mine and I am his. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine. She shall be brought unto the King in raiment of needlework: the virgins that be her fellows shall bear her company, and shall be brought unto thee.” MAKING AN UNFREQUENTED PATH OF ART HIS OWN

13 A​ pparently Rossetti’s decision to depict the bride of the Song of Songs was partly dictated by his model, for The Beloved “was originally conceived in 1863 as a Beatrice … but the features and ​ ​ fair colouring of the professional model Marie Ford … lent themselves more readily to the Bride of the Canticles” (Surtees 1:104-05). 14 R​ ossetti wanted “Roses of Sharon for the cup” in The Beloved but they were out of season ​ when he needed them, so he had to settle for “ordinary rose” (Correspondence 3:354). 15 ​ ​ T​ he tree branches probably allude to the various “trees of the wood”—“apple,” “fig,” “palm,” and so on—that are mentioned in the Song of Songs 2.3 and later. 16 V​ irginia Surtees notes that one of the models was a “gypsy girl” and Alastair Grieve suggests that Rossetti’s decision to include a black servant may have come from Olympia, “which … ​ ​ [he] probably saw on a visit to Manet’s studio in November 1864” (“The Beloved” 211). 17 A​ great admirer of Ingres, Rossetti might have recalled that La Grande Odalisque (1814), ​ which was on display at the Paris Exhibition when he visited it in November 1855 (see Correspondence 2:82), has a circular pearl ornament in the sitter’s hair that readily invites a sexual interpretation. On the bed beside her is an ornament not unlike the one worn by the black servant in The Beloved. 18 ​ T​ he “scale” of both Lady Lilith and Sibylla Palmifera is “almost that of life” but they are not ​ ​ considered in the present discussion because, although partaking of Rossetti’s aesthetic mode, they and their accompanying sonnets, “Body’s Beauty” and “Soul’s Beauty,” constitute a constellation of works that is rich in symbolic and metaphysical significance (as, indeed, is Venus Verticordia). See ​ ​ my “Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Lady Lilith.” 19 ​ ​ G​ rieve has suggested the “great sleeve” in Raphael’s portrait of Giovanna of Aragon in the ​ Louvre as an inspiration for the sleeve in the painting (“Monna Vanna” 214). Another possible inspiration may have been the brocades in works by the Venetian painter Carpaccio, for whom Rossetti expressed great admiration in the mid-to-late 1860s. “If you go to Venice, do not fail to look at all Carpaccio’s works in galleries and churches,” he urged Rae on 2 January 1865. “He is … most glorious as I know by photographs. There is some church dedicated to St. George [the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni] that contains some of his noblest things, and also an inexpressibly splendid series from the life of St. Ursula in the principal Gallery [the [33] cycle of the Scuola di Sant’ Orsolo ​ in the Academia]” (Correspondence 3:237). The Triumph of St. George and Saint George Baptizing ​ ​ ​ the Heathen King and Queen are especially rich in brocades. 20 ​ I​ n its formal unity, Monna Vanna answers to Clive Bell’s proto-modern concept of ​ “significant form,” which he defines as a quality “shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotion” through “relations and combinations of lines and colours” (23; and see 166-67 for Bell’s argument that the Pre-Raphaelites failed to appreciate that “the secret” of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century” art that they admired is “sensibility to the profound significance of form and the power of creation”). When its dark background and the overall form of its female figure are taken into account, Monna Vanna hearks back to elements of the neoclassical “grand style”—the “modulated ​ bituminous dark” background and the “formal pyramid” structure—that the Pre-Raphaelites earlier rejected in favour of fully rendered backgrounds (and foregrounds) and less geometrical arrangements of figures (Hunt 1:95 and 226-27; and see 2:401-03). In these respects, it is curiously reminiscent of such works as Gainsborough’s Portrait of Mrs. Siddons (National Gallery) and Reynold’s Mrs. ​ ​ Siddons as the Tragic Muse (Dulwich Gallery). 21 ​ T​ he principal source of the name is the Vita Nuova, where “Monna Vanna” is “Lady ​ ​ Giovanna” in reference to the beloved of Dante’s friend Guido Cavalcanti and a “lady… famous for her beauty” (see Rossetti, Collected Poetry and Prose 274-75 and 275n). “Because of her ​ comeliness,” Dante explains, “she was called of many Primavera (Spring)” and “prima verrá (she ​ ​ shall come first),” which also accords with the fact that she precedes Beatrice and thus, Dante also explains, stands in the same relation to her as John (Giovanni) the Baptist does to Christ. Almost needless to say, this last typological dimension does not pertain to Monna Vanna. ​ ​ MAKING AN UNFREQUENTED PATH OF ART HIS OWN

22 I​ n Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque (see note 17, above), the figure holds a fan made of ​ feathers that softly brushes and partially conceals her right thigh. 23 T​ he demeanor of the sitters in several of Rossetti’s pictures of women from Bocca Baciata ​ onwards are evocative of Baudelaire’s description of the oriental courtesan and her expression and gaze in “Le Peintre de la vie moderne” (1863): “Elle représente bien la sauvagerie dans la civilisation. Elle a sa beauté qui lui veint du Mal, toujours dénuée de spiritualité, mais quelquefois teinté d’une fatigue qui joue la mélancholie. Elle porte le regard à l’horizon, comme la bête de proie; même égarement, même distraction indolente, et aussi, parfois, même fixité d’attention. [Elle est un] [t]ype de bohѐme errant sure les confins d’une société réguliѐre” (1187-88; and see Walter Benjamin 314 for a characteristically perceptive discussion of Baudelaire’s remarks).

WORKS CITED

Ash, Russell. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. London: Pavilion Books, 1995. ​ ​ Baudelaire, Charles. Oeuvres complѐtes. Ed. Y.-G. Le Dantec and Claude Pichois. Bibliothѐque de la ​ ​ Pléade. Paris: Gallimard, 1961. Bell, Clive. Art. 1914. 2nd. Ed. 1949. London: Arrow Books, 1961. ​ ​ Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, ​ ​ Mass.: Harvard UP, 1999. [Buchanan, Robert]. “The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr. D.G. Rossetti.” Contemporary Review, 18 ​ ​ (October 1871): 334-50. Burnet, John. A Practical Treatise on Painting. In Three Parts. London: Printed for the Proprietor, ​ ​ 1827. Bentley, D.M.R. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Lady Lilith, Sibylla Palmifera, ‘Body’s Beauty,’ and ​ ​ ‘Soul’s Beauty.’” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, ns 13 (Fall 2004): 63-74. ​ ​ Grieve, Alastair. “The Beloved.” In The Pre-Raphaelites. 210-11. [34] ​ ​ ​ ---. “Monna Vanna.” In The Pre-Raphaelites. 214-15. ​ ​ Hunt, William Holman. Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 2nd ed. 2 vols. ​ ​ London: Chapman and Hall, 1913. Marillier, H[enry] C[urrie]. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: An Illustrated Memorial of His Art and Life. ​ ​ London: Bell, 1899. The Pre-Raphaelites. Catalogue for the Exhibition at the Tate Gallery, 7 March - 28 May 1984. ​ London: Tate Gallery/Penguin Books, 1984. Reynolds, Sir Joshua. Complete Works, with an Original Memoir, and Anecdotes of the Author. 3 ​ ​ vols. London: Thomas McLean, 1984. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Jerome McGann. New Haven: Yale UP, ​ ​ 2003. ---. Correspondence. Ed. William E. Fredeman. 5 vols (to date). Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002-05. ​ ​ ---. Poems. Ed. W.M. Rossetti. 2 vols. London: Ellis and Elvey, 1904. ​ ​ [Stephens, Frederick George]. “Mr. Rossetti’s Pictures.” Athenaeum, 21 October 1865: 545-46. ​ ​ Surtees, Virginia. The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882): A Catalogue ​ Raisonné. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon. 1971. [35] ​ ​