Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82), Ecce Ancilla Domini, 1849-50, Oil on canvas, 72.4x41.

9
cm. Tate Gallery, London.

Abusive criticism greeted this work when it was first shown at the Portland Gallery in 1850.
'An example of the perversion of talent which has been recently making too much way in
our school of Art', complained the Athenaeum; 'Mr. Dante Rossetti', protested the critic on
Blackwood's Magazine, is 'one of the high-priests of this retrograde school ...'. Rossetti
was so offended by the reception of this picture that, with few exceptions, he never again
exhibited his work in public. What these critics did not appreciate were the innovations of
this painting. Its shape is tall and narrow, suggestive of a slim gothic panel. Its colouring is
predominantly white, picked out in red, gold and blue, all colours with time-honoured
associations with Mary and the Virgin birth. Its iconography is odd: the Virgin is normally
pictured reading at a prie-dieu, rather than being woken up in bed wearing a nightdress;
the Angel Gabriel has flames at his feet, but no wings on his back. Rossetti's instincts
were poetic not narrative, and instead of meticulously recording the domestic details of
the scene, with all the ritualistic gestures hallowed by the conventions of picture, he
attempts to suggest, rather than illustrate, the miraculous atmosphere of the Annunciation.
It was also a particular difficulty for the mid-Victorian painter to paint a religious subject
realistically. When the medieval artist dressed his religious figures in the clothes of his
own period, it did not look ridiculous - every detail of daily life in the middle ages had an
equivalent spiritual significance, which made religious painting, no matter how realistic,
convincing. But to imagine a figure like Lord John Russell paying homage to the Infant
Saviour, his top hat standing by on a pedestal, would not only be laughable, but pathetic,
because by the mid-Victorian period an unbridgeable chasm had opened up between the
facts of modern life and the depths that religion was supposed to touch. Rossetti
recognized this problem, and in this picture of the Annunciation uses expressive colour
and design to awaken the spectator to the same range of feelings that traditionally a
representational painting of the subject encourages. His sister Christina had sat for the
Virgin, his brother William Michael had inspired the imagine of the Angel. The fatal
destiny of the Maiden had been already defined in some verses of Dante Gabriel's,
Mary's Girlhood (for a Picture):

This is that blessed Mary, pre-elect

God's Virgin. Gone is a great while, and she
Dwelt young in Nazareth of Galilee.
Unto God's will she brought devout respect,
Profound simplicity of intellect,
And supreme patience. From her mother's knee
Faithful and hopeful; wise in charity;
Strong in grave peace; in pity circumspect.
So held she through her girlhood; as it were
An angel-water'd lily, that near God
Grows and is quiet. Till, one dawn at home,
She woke in her white bed, and had no fear
At all,--yet wept till sunshine, and felt aw'd:
Because the fulness of the time was come.
('L'adolescenza della Vergine': 'finch un'alba nella casa/ si svegli nel suo letto bianco,
n ebbe timore/ ma pianse fino al tramonto e si sent tremare/ poich la pienezza del
tempo era giunta.')

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82), Beata Beatrix, 1863, Oil on canvas, 86.4 x 66 cm., Tate
Gallery, London

Elizabeth Siddal, Rossetti's wife and model, died of an overdose of laudanum in 1862, and
in the following year Rossetti began this memorial painting to her. He explained the
identification of Elizabeth Siddal with Beatrice, the ideal love of Dante, in the following
passage: 'The picture illustrates the Vita Nuova, embodying symbolically the death of
Beatrice as treated in that work. The picture is not intended at all to represent death, but
to render it under the semblance qf a trance, in which Beatrice, seated at a balcony
overlooking the city, is suddenly rapt from Earth to Heaven. You will remember how Dante
dwells on the desolation of the city in connection with the incident of her death, and for this
reason I have introduced it as my background, and made the figures of Dante and Love
passing through the street and gazing ominously on one another, conscious of the event;
while the bird, a messenger of death, drops the poppy between the hands of Beatrice.
She, through her shut lids, is conscious of a new world, as expressed in the last words of
the Vita Nuova - "That blessed Beatrice who now gazeth continually on His Countenance
qui est per omnia saecula benedictus" .' Elizabeth Siddal was Rossetti's Beatrice, an
ideal love, in whose beauty past and present, fact and symbol, death and life are
reconciled. Unlike Dante's Beatrice, however, Lizzie Siddal does not stand as a symbol of
Theology, but as a symbol of Art. In painting her in her moment of ecstasy, at the very
point between life and death, when the passions of the body are fused with the passions
of the spirit, Rossetti is making overt theological references to the Passion of Christ, to the
moment when death and resurrection, damnation and redemption, merge in the single
image of the crucifix. The passion of Beatrice in this painting also takes place against the
form of the cross. Her body is the upright, and on either side, in the arms of the cross,
stand the figures of Love and Dante. Rossetti paints passionately here, affirming that, both
as a testament to the memory of his wife and to the mysticism of Dante's world, the spirit
of Art transcends mortality as the spirit of Theology transcends the flesh.

John Everett Millais, Study of Elizabeth Siddal for the Head of Ophelia, 1851, Pencil on
paper, 19 x26.7 cm., Birmingham, City Art Gallery.

John Everett Millais (1829-96), Ophelia, 1851-2, Oil on canvas, 76.2 x 111.8 cm., London,
Tate Gallery.

There is a willow grows aslant a brook

That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come,
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them:
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up
...; but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.

Queen Gertrude's description of Ophelia's death in Hamlet, Act IV, is the inspiration for
Millais' painting. Unlike most other contemporary paintings based on Shakespearian
themes, Millais' Ophelia is neither a tableau vivant nor it is particularly dramatic.
Everything is relegated to the scintillating natural details of the scene. They form the real
incident of the painting, and stand out like silk embroidery from the bed of weeds and
grassy water plants in which the subject floats. Millais began this work in the summer of
1851, painting the river and the background by the River Ewell near Kingston-upon-
Thames. The outdoor location caused him some trouble. 'I sit tailor-fashion', he wrote,
'under an umbrella throwing a shadow scarcely larger than a halfpenny for eleven hours,
with a child's mug within reach to satisfy my thirst from the running stream beside me ...
am also in danger of being blown by the wind into the water, and becoming intimate with
the feelings of Ophelia when that lady sank to muddy death.' His model for Ophelia,
Elizabeth Siddal, also suffered fleshly mortifications when she sat for the picture. The
painting was completed in London during the following winter and Miss Siddal had to lie in
a bath of water, heated by oil lamps from below. The lamps were estinguished and
Elizabeth was taken seriously ill. The cold she caught as a result brought a complaint
against the artist from Miss Siddal's father, with the threat for an action of 50 damages.
The action was settled and Miss Siddal's portrait considered to be the best likeness ever
painted of her. The flowers are rich of symbolic meanings: some derive from the
Shakespearian test: willow (salice), nettle (ortica), daisy (margherita), associated to
forsaken love, sorrow, innocence. Other are added by the artist, like the poppy
(papavero), death's symbol, or the withered meadowsweets (olmarie appassite), symbol
of uselessness.