A Multifaced Muse: Towards Understanding the Concepts of Femininity and Art in the Artistic Consciousness of D.G.Rossetti

Abstract

The article analyses the artistic work of D. G. Rossetti in the context of his aesthetic concepts of art and femininity and in the inseparable unity of its verbal and visual beginnings. The material for the research was the sonnets of the English poet included in the collection “House of Life”, as well as  some famous paintings by the artist, which formed a new canon of female beauty in Victorian culture and significantly influenced the English aestheticism of the late 19th century. Rossetti’s poetic and pictorial practice demonstrates a constant and intense search for ways to embody the artistic ideal of femininity and the concept of art formed by the artist at the very beginning of his career, as metaphorically expressed in his novella “Hand and Soul”. The meaning of Rossetti’s concept of art was in the clear understanding that an artist should express his soul, his unique vision of the world, beauty, and life in his artistic works. The article proposes a hypothesis about the evolutionary nature of Rossetti’s work. The paper examines the stages of development of his aesthetic concepts of femininity and art, which are associated with the presence of different female models who became his muses and lovers in certain periods of the artist’s life. The research argues that the essence of the evolution of Rossetti’s creative pursuits and practices was the desire to  overcome the gap between life and art and remove the contradictions of the  traditional dichotomy of the spiritual and the bodily-sensual, the soul and the body. This process was embodied in Rossetti’s gradual transition from the depiction of disembodied spirituality that dominated the sublime images of women created under the influence of Elizabeth Siddal, who was associated with Dante’s Beatrice, to the accentuated sensual beauty of the seductive Lilith and the almost simultaneously painted by the artist new, transformed images of Beatrice, inspired by his second important woman in his life, Jane Morris, and finally to the stylized and androgynous images of Pandora, Proserpine, and Astarte, also inspired by Jane. Namely, in her image, the artist’s ideas about femininity and beauty, love, life, and death, and his understanding of art as a reflection of the creative, androgynous author’s self were fully embodied. Rossetti’s iconic images were correlated with the verbal ones which complemented the visual ones, which testifies to the integrity of the English artist’s verbal and visual worlds.