Cintia 's blog

First of all, I would like to say that at the beginning of this course, I don´t know a lot of things about Rossetti, but now after having done these two papers about him, I have learnt a lot of things about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the double-work of art in Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

As I said in my introduction, this paper is a continuation of my first paper. In my first paper, I analyse the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had on him through the analysis of the poem “ The Blessed Damozel” because of that in my second paper I decided to focus my attention in an important aspect on Rossetti´s life: his double-work of art. The terms poetry and paintings are closely entwined in Dante Rossetti´s works.

In my paper, I have studied a core set of poems. I have searched information about the painting and the poem to reflect the typical Rossettian double-work. This double-work normally consist on the execution of a painting and then the writing of a poem, typically a sonnet that represents and contains the most relevant aspects of the painting.

Rossetti has a huge variety of topics in his paintings, but I have observed that the role of the woman on Rossetti´s paintings is really important. I think that Elizabeth Siddal, his wife, was an important element on Dante´s pictorical life. She inspired him, she was his muse, she was his ideal of beauty.

Moreover, another important topic that I have observed is the religious. In some paintings, the religious factor is present. He is interested in Medieval Christianity because he saw in that culture the signs of a belief in real spiritual presence. The Renaissance represents a great collapse of spiritual values and the emergence of the souless self-reflections in art and culture.

This double-work, that it is common in Rossetti, I believe that it is a very useful and innovate way to express the feelings too.

After finishing my blog, I have to say that I learnt a lot of things about how make a good use of the Internet and I hope people enjoy reading this blog.

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List of the most important double-works

13 desembre 2010 per cinfusme

LIST OF THE MOST IMPORTANT DOUBLE-WORK

-Michael Scott´s Wooing

-Sister Helen

-Dante at Verona

-Aspecta Medusa

-The Girlhood of Mary Virginother

-Mary Magdalena at the Door of Simon the Pharisee

-The Passover in the Holly Family

-Proserpine

-Sibylla Palmifera

-The Blessed Damozel

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What´s a double-work of art in Rossetti?

13 desembre 2010 per cinfusme

WHAT´S A DOUBLE-WORK OF ART IN ROSSETTI?

Poetry and image are closely entwined in Rossetti’s work; he frequently wrote sonnets to accompany his pictures.The typical Rossettian double work is the execution of a picture and then the writing of a poem—typically a sonnet or a pair of sonnets—that comments and elaborates upon the pictorial work.

There is a core set of about thirty double works, i.e., works that have original Rossettian textual and pictorial elements. For a number of these works, like Michael Scott’s Wooing, Sister Helen, Dante at Verona, Aspecta Medusa, or Mnemosyne, some of the elements (textual or material or both) do not survive, or they come down to us only in incomplete forms. Then there is the key group of such works.

Well-known works in this group are: The Girlhood of Mary Virginother, La Bella Mano,The Day Dream, Lady Lilith (or “Body’s Beauty”), Fiammetta, The Question, Pandora, The Sea-Spell, Astarte Syriaca, Cassandra, Found, Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee,The Passover in the Holy Family, Proserpine, Sibylla Palmifera (“Soul’s Beauty”) and “The Blessed Damozel”.

Rossetti’s double works emerge from two established traditions, one textual and one pictorial, that he exploited and developed in important ways.

Rossetti’s contributions to this genre include some of his most important works. He called them, in general, Sonnets for Pictures, a rubric under which he would eventually gather some of his own double works. The first set of Sonnets for Pictures, however, comprised a group of six that appeared in the fourth number of The Germ in 1850.

The other tradition supplied Rossetti with models of pictorial doublings. The tradition has two lines, and both were important for his work. On one hand is history painting (including the literary picture), and on the other are book illustrations and miniatures. Many—indeed, most—of Rossetti’s pictorial works are visual interpretations of textual scenes or events, commonly medieval or contemporary.

From Rossetti Archive:http://www.rossettiarchive.org/racs/doubleworks.rac.html

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Sibylla Palmifera

13 desembre 2010 per cinfusme

SIBYLLA PALMIFERA

1.Here it is the poem, that it is named ” Soul´s Beauty”.

Under the arch of Life, where love and death,
Terror and mystery, guard her shrine, I saw
Beauty enthroned; and though her gaze struck awe,
I drew it in as simply as my breath.
Hers are the eyes which, over and beneath,
The sky and sea bend on thee,– which can draw,
By sea or sky or woman, to one law,
The allotted bondman of her palm and wreath.

This is that Lady Beauty, in whose praise
Thy voice and hand shake still, –long known to thee
By flying hair and fluttering hem, –the beat
Following her daily of thy heart and feet,
How passionately and irretrievably,
In what fond flight, how many ways and days!

http://www.artmagick.com/poetry/poem.aspx?id=11495&name=souls-beauty

2.The sonnet generates two distinct self-presentations. These correspond to the two main versions of the sonnet: the 1870 text (titled “Sibylla Pamifera (For a Picture)”), and the 1881 text (titled “Soul’s Beauty”).

The painting is more grotesque than it perhaps ought to be, given its elaborate classical accessories. But those classical materials, ornately and loosely articulated, do not lend a sense of dignity to the picture as they might be expected to do. To the contrary, they develop on one hand a bizarre and ambiguous spatial structure, and on the other an almost crepuscular atmosphere from the strange juxtapositions of artificial and natural forms.

The center of the allegory is the woman whom DGR named “beauty the Palm-giver, i.e., the Principle of Beauty, which draws all high-toned men to itself, whether with the aim of embodying it in art or only of attaining its enjoyment in life”.

This sonnet represents one of DGR’s most important statements of his artistic ideals. The 1881 sonnet offers itself as a general comment on the relation of the artist to the idea of the Beautiful.

The sonnet pivots around two allusions: first, to Dante’s Paradiso,and second, to Botticelli

In the sonnet, the Dante/Botticelli relation serves as a figural analogue for DGR’s own “double work of art”, which is of course being exemplified in this very instance of DGR’s work. Here it would be fair to say that the textual work more fully illustrates DGR’s ideal of the “double work of art”: for it is the textual work that so brilliantly doubles itself as at once a textual and a pictorial event. The doubling centers in the play DGR makes with the words “drew” and “draw” .

The most important of DGR’s many wordplays, it enacts the fusion of a textual act and a pictorial one.

From the Rossetti Archive: http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/1-1867.s193.raw.htmlt

3.This painting represents the more mysterious ‘Soul’s Beauty’, surrounded by symbols of love, death, and fate. These include roses and blind cupid (love), poppies and a skull (death), butterflies (the human soul) and a carved sphinx (mystery).

By 1866 Rossetti had written a sonnet to accompany the picture. It was later known as ‘Soul’s Beauty’ and was juxtaposed with the sonnet ‘Body’s Beauty’ that went with ‘Lady Lilith’. The sonnet does not present spiritual beauty as being without human passions, as it was in some other interpretations of the time.

http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/exhibitions/rossetti/works/beauties/sibyllapalmifera.aspx

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Proserpine

13 desembre 2010 per cinfusme

PROSERPINE

Dante Gabriel Rossetti became, of his generation, one of the finest exponents in the medium of coloured chalks. From his ‘Medieval’ watercolours of the 1850s to his symbolic female figure subjects in oil, his technical prowess reached its apex toward the end of his life in his series of highly finished pastel drawings, He had started to make images in chalk in the mid 1860s under the guidance of Frederick Sandys.39 Three versions of Proserpine exist in oil: the primary version dated 1877 ,the second dated 1874 (Tate Gallery) and the final version of 1882 (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery). The present work is the only recorded full-scale version of Rossetti’s Proserpine composition in chalks made by the artist himself.

Proserpine is a young woman in Greek and Roman mythology who is kidnapped by Pluto, the god of the Underworld. Pluto brings the girl down into his kingdom with the intentions of making her his wife. Proserpine, unhappy and miserably wishing to be back in the world of the living, only eats a few seeds of pomegranate. However, since she consumes some of the food of the Underworld, she becomes bound to that realm and must become Pluto’s wife. Pluto and Ceres, Proserpine’s mother, make a deal in which Proserpine stays in the Underworld for half of a year and resides with the living for the other six months.

Proserpine perhaps most strongly conveys Rossetti’s infatuation with her archetypal ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ looks; rich, raven hair and long, elegant neck, and his ideals of spiritual love, nurtured by his constant reading of Dante.

Unable to decide as a young man whether to concentrate on painting or poetry, his work is infused with his poetic imagination and an individual interpretation of literary sources. His accompanying sonnet to this work is a poem of longing. Carrying an inescapable allusion to his yearning to seduce Jane from her unhappy marriage with William Morris.

As a painting that displays almost all of the characteristics of the second half of D.G. Rossetti’s career, Proserpine is exemplary. Worked in colored chalks and featuring Jane Morris, the second great love of Rossetti’s life, as the Underworld goddess Proserpina, the painting projects a mood of “dreamy sensuality”.And lends itself to interpretation in terms of the themes that occupied Rossetti throughout his lifetime.

In his 1874 picture Proserpine, Dante Gabriel Rossetti illustrates the namesake of the work in the typical style of the PRB. Proserpine is an exquisitely beautiful woman, with her delicately painted facial features; sensitive, slender hands, and flawlessly pale skin set off by her dark thick hair. She holds in one of her hands the fruit that condemned her to live six months in the Underworld. The red of both the pomegranate and her lips appear warm and sensuous compared to the cool palate of the rest of the painting. The girl wears a blue silken gown. Rossetti attentively portrays the creases and folds of the clothing with much detail and realism. An ivy branch curls in the background, while in the foreground, a gold or brass incense burner emits incense smoke. A light — a glimpse of the world of the living — shines into the room, illuminating the morose girl and the far wall. Prosperine’s saddened eyes, which are the same cold blue color as most of the painting, indirectly stare at the other realm. Overall, dark hues characterize the color scheme of the piece.

From Victorian web: http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/dgr/drawings/ringel4.html

Like La Bella Mano, this is something more than a double work. DGR wrote an accompanying sonnet in Italian, and then translated the sonnet into English. That textual sequence—from Italian to English—is important to keep in mind. DGR also wrote a prose ekphrasis of the picture. DGR’s interest in this subject is fairly indicated when we remember that he executed at least eight entirely different versions of the picture.

http://www.rossettiarchive.org/racs/doubleworks.rac.html#P

Proserpine is both beautiful and symbolic. Rossetti was obviously inspired bythe story of Proserpine (which is the Roman name for the Greek goddess Persephone), a story which is one of the most memorable of the Classical myths.

In mythology, Proserpine was the daughter of Ceres. The maiden goddess was abducted by Pluto (who was the ruler of the dark Underworld). According to some versions of the tale, after Proserpine was transported to the realm of Pluto, she made the mistake of eating the seeds of a pomegranate. By consuming pomegranate seeds, Proserpine was bound to dwell in the Underworld for at least part of the year.

In the painting, Proserpine is represented holding a pomegranate. Clearly, the fruit has been partially consumed, for the rich red inside of the pomegranate is visible. It is interesting to note that the model for this compelling image was the ‘stunner’ Jane Morris. Jane was the wife of Rossetti’s friend and fellow artist William Morris, and there is much evidence to prove that Rossetti was more than a bit in love with his beautiful model. It is possible that Rossetti, by portraying Jane as Proserpine, was making a subtle (or not so subtle, as the case may be) reference to her marriage to Morris.

http://www.loggia.com/art/19th/rossetti12.html

Here it is the poem:

LUNGI è la luce che in sù questo muro
Rifrange appena, un breve istante scorta
Del rio palazzo alla soprana porta.
Lungi quei fiori d’Enna, O lido oscuro,
Dal frutto tuo fatal che omai m’è duro.
Lungi quel cielo dal tartareo manto
Che quì mi cuopre: e lungì ahi lungi ahi quanto
Le notti che saran dai dì che furo.
Lungi da me mi sento; e ognor sognando
Cerco e ricerco, e resto ascoltatrice;
E qualche cuore a qualche anima dice,
(Di cui mi giunge il suon da quando in quando.
Continuamente insieme sospirando,)—
“Oimè per te, Proserpina infelice!”

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 Tartarean 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!”

Url: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/proserpina/

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Magdalene at the door of Simon the Pharisee

13 desembre 2010 per cinfusme

MAGDALENE AT THE DOOR OF SIMON THE PHARISEE

This famous drawing gives an important statement of DGR’s thoughts about the relation of pictorial forms of representation to the expression of ideas.

DGR named the central idea of the picture “two houses opposite each other”. The phrase signifies primarily the opposed houses of worldliness and spirituality, here shown competing for the soul of Mary Magdalene. But DGR’s unusual drawing forces the phrase to signify as well another, closely related opposition that concerns the practise of art. For DGR, Pre-Raphaelitism manifested an artistic contradiction that he sought to illustrate in this drawing.

The conceptual center of the drawing is this image, which enters the picture as an iconic form.

The drawing recalls Rossetti’s admiration of primitive style and the alternative it offered to perspectivist rationality.

The sonnet that Rossetti wrote to accompany the picture replicates this opposition in the division between octave and sestet: the former is spoken by the Magdalene’s worldly lover, calling her back; the latter by the Magdalene, who longs for Christ. Her desire receives a remarkable form of expression when she speaks of “my Bridegroom’s face/ That draws me to him”

From Rossetti Archive: http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/s109.rap.html

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The Passover in the Holy Family

13 desembre 2010 per cinfusme

THE PASSOVER IN THE HOLY FAMILY

1.The scene is in the house-porch, where Christ holds a bowl of blood from which Zacharias is sprinkling the posts and lintel. Joseph has brought the lamb and Elisabeth lights the pyre. The shoes which John fastens and the bitter herbs which Mary is gathering form part of the ritual.” But not all of these details are in the picture, which DGR left unfinished: in particular, neither Joseph nor Elizabeth appear in the scene. Surtees’ comments pick up other important details: “By the opening of the well on the extreme left two pieces of wood tied together with string form a Cross to which the water-cask is attached. The opening framed by a vine, behind the foreground figures, reveals a table in an interior, set with bread and wine”.

The picture thus helps to explain both the difference and the continuity between his early work, with its Christian preoccupations, and his later work, where pagan materials get more elaborated. DGR is interested in Christianity because it is a mythos of real spiritual presence and not of merely symbolic forms; and he is interested in “Pre-Raphaelite” or Medieval Christianity because he saw in that culture the signs of a belief in real spiritual presence. For DGR, the Renaissance (and its attendant religious reformations) represented a great collapse of spiritual values and the emergence of “soulless self-reflections of man’s skill” in art and culture.

DGR is not a Christian, for he is as interested in pagan and polytheist spiritual presences as he is in Christian and monotheist ones. The double interest is evident.

Like DGR’s texts and pictures associated with the Virgin Mary, this work focuses on a crucial feature of Christian devotional symbolism. The point here is to represent the structure of typological symbolism.

From Rossetti Archive: http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/s78.rap.html

2.In comparison with other works we have examined, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Passover in the Holy Family represents both a new approach to typological symbolism and a new way of inscribing a textual narrative onto a painting. The watercolor shows the Holy Family preparing for the Passover holiday: Mary gathers bitter herbs, one of the traditional components of the Seder plate, while Zachary paints the door and lintel of the house with lamb’s blood as prescribed by the Book of Exodus. Jesus holds the bowl of lamb’s blood as John the Baptist ties Jesus’s shoes. All these actions are invested with typological symbolism. The poem explicitly spells out the symbolism of the painting; for example, it states what John is doing and identifies the typological meaning of this action.

Here meet together the prefiguring day
And day prefigured. ‘Eating, thou shalt stand,
Feet shod, loins girt, thy road-staff in thine hand,
With blood-stained door and lintel,’ — did God say
By Moses’ mouth in ages passed away.
And now, where this poor household doth comprise
At Paschal-Feast two kindred families, —
Lo! the slain lamb confronts the Lamb to slay.

The pyre is piled. What agony’s crown attained,
What shadow of death the Boy’s fair brow subdues
Who holds that blood wherewith the porch is stained
By Zachary the priest? John binds the shoes
He deemed himself not worthy to unloose;
And Mary culls the bitter herbs ordained.

From Victorian Web: http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/dgr/drawings/kashtan4.html

3.To celebrate Passover, every Jewish household slaughtered a lamb and marked the doorposts with its blood. This was a sign for the Lord to pass over and not visit the plague on them. The Passover meal of roast lamb, bitter herbs and unleavened bread was to be eaten in haste, with shoes on the feet ready for quick departure. Rossetti shows Jesus and his parents preparing for the ritual. This stresses the continuity between Judaism and Christianity, linking Christ’s sacrifice with that of the Passover lamb. Rossetti shows Zachariah marking the door with blood from a bowl held by Jesus. John kneels to fasten Jesus’s sandal and Mary stoops to gather bitter herbs.

Url: http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/exhibitions/rossetti/works/religion/passover.aspx

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Found

13 desembre 2010 per cinfusme

FOUND

Rossetti always regarded ‘Found’ as one of his most important paintings, although it was never finished, despite being worked at intermittently over a period of almost twenty years. The present drawing dates from Rossetti’s third major campaign of work on the painting in the winter of 1869-1870.

The history of the painting is complex. The precise date of its genesis is obscured by the fact that Rossetti wished to claim primacy in developing modern life moral subjects within the Pre-Raphaelite movement, as the letter above makes clear. The exact progress of the work is also hard to determine, but we can be reasonably certain of the place of the present drawing in the sequence.

here are many reasons why ‘Found’ remained unfinished. Rossetti had problems with space and perspective, which had handicapped his oil painting since his Brotherhood days. It is significant that the background is the least finished part of the painting. In addition, by the late 1860s, the subject matter of ‘Found’ was outdated.

From Victorian Web: http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/dgr/paintings/11.html

The picture represents the climactic moment of a countryman’s search for his sweetheart, who has become a prostitute in London. The sentimental literature dealing with this double work’s story-picture is very large. Although the picture was begun as early as 1853, the sonnet was not written until quite late, shortly before 16 February 1881. The painting that doubles the sonnet, and that called forth the later text, occupied DGR’s attention from the early 50s, and was left unfinished at his death

From Rossetti Archive: http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/7-1881.s64.raw.html

Women who had given in to seduction, living a life in sin, received the name “fallen women” during the Victorian period. Though both a recognizable and sizable segment of the female population, it took some time before the fallen woman could be accepted as an allowable subject in art.

In Rossetti’s Found, a drover discovers his former beloved, now a prostitute, slumped against a wall. The unfinished painting focuses in on the struggle between them as the man tries to lift her, but she seems both too ashamed and self-determined to go with him. The question of why she should resist him when his face is so contorted in pity and concern, forces the viewer to look at the drover’s calf in the background, trapped and struggling within a web of restraints. It seems that either the woman is too entangled in her life of sin of else she refuses to be caught in the impositions of married life, represented in the net which holds the calf. At any rate, Rossetti problematizes the all-too-easy instant condemnation of the fallen woman and her motives.

From Victorian Web: http://www.victorianweb.org/gender/fallen.html

Here it is the poem

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

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

Url: http://www.artmagick.com/poetry/poem.aspx?id=11233&name=found

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Cassandra

13 desembre 2010 per cinfusme

CASSANDRA

The formal structure of the sonnet is especially apt for the subject of this work and DGR’s pictorial conception. Cassandra’s prophecy rhymes with Hector’s action in that both are full of tension and energy, but in each case they will prove ineffective. Nevertheless, the sonnets seem far less successful than the picture in carrying out DGR’s conceptual purposes.

The work stands in a central relation to his oeuvre in general. Of course it relates quite directly to Troy Town, but it intersects as well with many of his other works. DGR was not only preoccupied with tales of cultural armageddon, he took a syncretic approach to literary, mythological, and religious materials.

This was one of the “seven new sonnets” DGR wrote and sent to his printer in mid-September 1869

DGR executed the drawing in 1860 and finished it late that year or very early in 1861, but it was much reworked in 1867. DGR said that he hoped to do a painting of the subject but he never did. There is a sketch of a warrior made by DGR on the verso of the British Library manuscript of Nuptial Sleep that strongly resembles the figure of Hector in the picture. It may be a study for the painting DGR never executed.

DGR described the picture in the following terms: “The incident is just before Hector’s last battle. Cassandra has warned him in vain by her prophecies, and is now throwing herself against a pillar, and rending her clothes in despair, because he will not be detained longer. He is rushing down the steps and trying to make himself heard across the noise, as he shouts an order to an officer in charge of the soldiers who are going round the ramparts on their way to battle. One of his captains is beckoning to him to make haste. Behind him is Andromache with her child, and a nurse who is holding the cradle. Helen is arming Paris in a leisurely way on a sofa; we may presume from her expression that Cassandra has not spared her in her denunciations. Paris is patting her on the back to soothe her, much amused. Priam and Hecuba are behind, the latter stopping her ears in horror. One brother is imploring Cassandra to desist from her fear-inspiring cries.

Url: http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/27-1869.s127.rawcollection.html

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Conclusion

List of the most important double-works

What´s a double-work of art in Rossetti?

Sibylla Palmifera

Proserpine

Magdalene at the door of Simon the Pharisee

The Passover in the Holy Family

Found

Cassandra

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