Terza e ultima parte della presentazione del modulo

della prof.ssa Gabrieli

I Preraffaelliti

The Pre-Raphaelites THE PRE-RAPHAELITE

BROTHERHOOD• Dante Gabriel Rossetti• John Everett Millais• William Holman Hunt• Thomas Woolner• William Michael Rossetti• James Collinson• Frederick Stephens

• John Ruskin• Ford Madox Brown

• Edward Burne-Jones• William Morris

• “to go to nature in all singleness of heart, rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing”

(Ruskin)

JOHN EVERETT MILLAIS

Millais, Ruskin

Millais, Cymon and Iphigenia

Millais,Isabella and Lorenzo

Pala Sforzesca, Beatrice d’Este

Millais, Christ in the house of his parents

Millais, Mariana

• Laertes “Drowned! O, where?”• Queen Gertrude “There is a willow grows askant the brook,

That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.Therewith fantastic garlands did she makeOf crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purplesThat liberal shepherds give a grosser name,But our cold maids do dead-men's-fingers call them.There on the pendent boughs her crownet weedsClambering to hang, an envious sliver broke,When down her weedy trophies and herselfFell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up;Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes,As one incapable of her own distress,Or like a creature native and induedUnto that element. But long it could not beTill that her garments, heavy with their drink,Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious layTo muddy death.”

• Laertes “Alas, then she is drowned?” • Queen Gertrude “Drowned, drowned”

crowflowers

weeping willow

nettles

margherite

long purples

Millais, The blind girl

WILLIAM HOLMAN HUNT

Hunt, Claudio and Isabella

Hunt, Valentine and Proteus

Hunt, The light of the world

Hunt, The scapegoat

Hunt,The awakening conscience

Hunt, The Lady of Shalott

FORD MADOX BROWN

Brown, An English Autumn Afternoon

Brown, Brown, Carrying the corn

Brown,The hayfield

Brown, Walton-on-the-Naze

Madox Brown, The pretty baa-lambs

Madox Brown,The last

of England

Madox Brown, Work

The Germ, 1850

DANTE GABRIELE ROSSETTI

Rossetti, Girlhood of Mary

Virgin

Rossetti, Ecce Ancilla Domini

Oxford murals

My own belief is that I am a poet (within the limit of my powers) primarily and that it is my poetic tendencies that chiefly give value to my pictures: only painting being – what poetry is not – a livelihood – I have put my poetry chiefly in that form. On the other hand, the bread-and-cheese question has led a good deal of my painting being pot-boiling and no more – whereas my verse, being unprofitable, has remained (as much as I have found time for) unprostituted.

(Lettera di D.G.Rossetti a T.G.Hake, 21 aprile 1870)

I have not unfrequently heard my brother say that he considered himself more essentially a poet than a painter.

To vary the form of expression, he thought that he had mastered the means of embodying poetical conceptions in the verbal and rhythmical vehicle more thoroughly than in form and design, perhaps more thoroughly than in colour

(Dalla Introduzione di W.M. Rossetti alla edizione di The Poetical works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, London, Ellis and Elvey,1891, p.xxx)

Introductory sonnet to The House of Life

• Dante, Divina Commedia• Dante, Vita nuova• Thomas Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur, (finito nel

1470 e pubblicato dall’editore Caxton nel 1485) rielaborazione quattrocentesca delle leggende

del ciclo arturiano (Lancillotto e Ginevra, Tristano e Isotta, la vicenda del Santo Graal etc.)

• Elizabeth Siddal (1829 -1862)

Dante in meditation holding a

pomegranate (symbol of

immortality)

1852

Elizabeth Siddal

"One face looks out from all his canvases,One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:We found her hidden just behind those screens,That mirror gave back all her loveliness.A queen in opal or in ruby dress,A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens,A saint, an angel - every canvas meansThe same one meaning, neither more nor less.He feeds upon her face by day and night,And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;Not as she is, but as she fills his dream."

------- Christina Rossetti, In an Artist's Studio (1856)

Lizzy

Lizzy Siddal

Lizzy in a chair

Lizzy Siddal

Lizzy Siddal plaiting her hair

E.Siddal, Self-portrait

E.Siddal, Self-portrait

E.Siddal, The Lady of Shalott

E.Siddal, Portrait of Clara Siddal

E.Siddal, Lovers listening to music

E.Siddal, Before the

battle

Beatrice nega a Dante il saluto (1853)

Dante,Vita Nuova e traduzione di DGR

• E per questa cagione, cioè di questa soverchievole voce che parea che m’infamasse viziosamente, quella gentilissima, la quale fue distruggitrice di tutti li vizi e regina de le virtudi, passando per alcuna parte, mi negò lo suo dolcissimo salutare, ne lo quale stava tutta la mia beatitudine

• ...and by this it happened...that she who was the destroyer of all evil and the queen of all good, coming where I was, denied me her sweet salutation, in the which alone was my blessedness

Primo anniversario della morte di Beatrice (1853)

• In quel giorno nel quale si compiea l’anno che questa donna era fatta de li cittadini di vita eterna, io mi sedea in parte ne la quale, ricordandomi di lei, disegnava uno angelo sopra certe tavolette; e mentre io lo disegnava, volsi li occhi, e vidi lungo me uomini a li quali si convenia di fare onore. E’ riguardavano quello che io facea; e secondo che mi fu detto poi, elli erano stati già alquanto anzi che io me ne accorgessi.Quando li vidi, mi levai, e salutando loro dissi: “Altri era testé meco, però pensava”.

Paolo e Francesca

Paolo e Francesca“Quali colombe dal disìo chiamate”

Inferno, canto V, vv.82-142

I’cominciai: “Poeta, volentieri

parlerei a quei due che ’nsieme vanno,

e paion sì al vento esser leggeri”.

Noi leggiavamo un giorno per dilettodi Lancialotto come amor lo strinse:soli eravamo e sanza alcun sospetto.Per più fiate gli occhi ci sospinsequella lettura, e scolorocci il viso;ma solo un punto fu quel che ci vinse.Quando leggemmo il disiato riso esser baciato da cotanto amante,questi che da me non fia diviso, la bocca mi baciò tutto tremante.Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse:quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.

Paolo e Francesca

O lasso

Quanti dolci pensier quanto disìo

Menò costoro al doloroso passo

Rossetti, Arthur’s tomb

The Tune of the seven towers 1857

The Blue Closet 1857

The wedding of saint George and the Princess Sabra 1857

How Sir Galahad

Roman de la Rose

Beata Beatrix

Bocca baciata1859

“bocca baciata non perde

ventura,anzi rinnova come fa

la luna”, Decameron, giornata II, novella VII

• When Hunt in 1860 saw this picture he judged that DGR had “completely changed his philosophy”, which he showed in his art, “leaving monastic sentiment for Epicureanism” (see Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, vol. 2, 111-112).

“Here is something quite new for Rossetti—a voluptuous, inscrutable image, coarse and sensual perhaps, but experienced in precisely the way that differs so essentially from the early work. And Venetian Cinquecento painting now provides Rossetti with a model that replaces his earlier preference for Florentine and Sienese Quattrocento” (The Pre-Raphaelites, Tate 1984, 25).

Tiziano, Giovane donna

alla toletta c.1515

Dante sogna la morte di Beatrice 1856

Dante sogna la morte di Beatrice, 1870

...e fu sì forte la erronea fantasia, che mi mostrò questa donna morta: e pareami che donne la covrissero, cioè la sua testa, con un bianco velo; e pareami che la sua faccia avesse tanto aspetto d’umilitade...

(Vita Nuova, XXIII, 7-9)

Fazio’s lover (1863;1873)

per illustrare, nella prima versione, la canzone di Fazio degli

Uberti, “Io miro i crespi e biondi capegli”

MonnaVanna1866

il titolo allude a Madonna

Giovanna,la donna amata

da Guido Cavalcanti

Lady Lilith

Regina cordium

1866

The beloved1865

Venus Verticordia1864-66

Jane Burden

Jane Burden

Jane Burden

Jane Burden

Proserpina1874

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 lungi ahi lungi ahi quanto

Le notti che saràn 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!”

• In 1878 DGR gave a long description of the symbolic context of the picture to W. A. Turner, who had just bought the (so-called) sixth version: “The figure represents Proserpine as Empress of Hades. After she was conveyed by Pluto to his realm, and became his bride, her mother Ceres importuned Jupiter for her return to earth, and he was prevailed on to consent to this, provided only she had not partaken any of the fruits of Hades. It was found, however, that she had eaten one grain of a pomegranate, and this enchained her to her new empire and destiny. She is represented in a gloomy corridor of her palace, with the fatal fruit in her hand. As she passes, a gleam strikes on the wall behind her from some inlet suddenly opened, and admitting for a moment the light of the upper world; and she glances furtively toward it, immersed in thought. The incense-burner stands behind her as the attribute of a goddess. The ivy-branch in the background (a decorative appendage to the sonnet inscribed on the label) may be taken as a symbol of clinging memory” (see Sharp, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 236).

Perla nera

Mariana

Pia dei Tolomei

aurea catena

reverie

la donna della fiamma

Astarte syriaca

The Blessed damozel1873-78

• “I saw that Poe had done the utmost it was possible to do with the grief of the lover on earth, and so I determined to reverse the conditions, and give utterance to the yearning of the loved one in heaven”(Caine, Recollections, 284).