A condensed excerpt by Julian Treherz from: Pre-Raphaelite and Other Masters

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) was one of the most unusual and original of all Victorian artists. He reacted against the prevailing tendency towards realism and created a new kind of art, painting in his maturity powerful and mysterious dreamlike images of women that convey, through poetic suggestiveness and allusive detail, ideas of sensuality, beauty, love, death and destiny.

For Rossetti, women embodied the mystery of life, and this belief ran through his diverse subject matter from his early pictures of the Virgin Mary, typifying female virtue, to the femmes fatales of his later work, representing the power of women over men. A distinguished poet as well as a painter, he was able to enrich his work through his familiarity with European literature, especially with his namesake Dante (1265–1321).

Rossetti gained his love of the Italian poet’s work from his father, a Dante scholar who had come to London as a political exile. Dante’s intense vision of Beatrice, his ideal love for her that transcended death, was one of the wellsprings of Rossetti’s art, and at times his own life seemed to run in parallel. The visionary world he constructed in his art was imaginary, but it was built on personal experience; his ideals of female beauty were inspired by the delicate features of Elizabeth Siddal, his early muse, who died tragically soon after their marriage, and then by the statuesque Jane Morris, the wife of his friend William Morris. But he also frequently used professional models.

Owing to its association with love, music was often a feature of Rossetti’s paintings of women. In La Ghirlandata the beautiful but impassive Alexa Wilding is depicted plucking at the strings of a harp, garlanded with lushly blooming roses and honeysuckle, flowers that Rossetti associated with sexual attraction. Her hair is again loose and her draperies flutter about her neck in decorative flowing lines. The chalk drawing is more muted than the richly glowing oil in the Guildhall Art Gallery, London, for which this is the finished study, but, like the oil, the drawing is a carefully controlled decorative composition that creates an enclosed world of art, beauty and love.

With The Blessed Damozel and A Vision of Fiammetta Rossetti created images of great beauty that express his deeply held beliefs about love and death. His poem The Blessed Damozel, originally published in 1850, describes lovers separated by death: the Damozel, in heaven, yearns to be reunited with her lover, who is imprisoned on earth. The chalk drawing is the finished study for the oil painting, which is in two parts, the upper panel showing the Damozel (modelled by Alexa Wilding) looking down from heaven at her lover, the lower one depicting him gazing up at her. In the oil she is shown with white lilies and red roses, symbolising love that is both pure and physical, but in the chalk drawing she bears only lilies. A Vision of Fiammetta was inspired by a sonnet by the Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) about his last sight of Fiammetta, the object of his love. The original sonnet, Rossetti’s translation of it and a further sonnet written by Rossetti about Fiammetta are all inscribed on the frame. Fiammetta, modelled by Marie Spartali, wears a flame-coloured dress in allusion to her name. Her figure stands glowing against a dark background: a vision of the brief moment between life and death.

The short-lived apple blossom signifies the transience of beauty: Fiammetta stands entwined in the branches of an apple tree surrounded by emblems of the departing soul a shower of falling red and white blossom, a blood-red bird (the messenger of death), butterflies (symbols of the soul) and an angel in the aureole around her head. The painting has an extraordinary power and presence. With its frame designed by the artist, it is a beautiful object in itself and a representation of female allure; at the same time it is an image of death and of love that lasts beyond the grave.

For more from this essay + footnotes, and more, buy the book: Pre-Raphaelite and Other Masters: The Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection. You can purchase this book from all good bookshops, or you can get a discount online at Amazon.

Reproduced by kind permission of the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Originally published in "Pre-Raphaelite and Other Masters – The Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection" © 2003 Royal Academy of Arts, London.