Dante Gabriel Rossetti's La Bionda

La Bionda del Balcone

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s La Bionda

by Joan K. Yanni

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator who founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. He was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement, most notably William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones.

Rossetti was born in London and originally named Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti. His family and friends called him Gabriel, but in publications he put the name Dante first, in honor of Dante Alighieri. He was the brother of poet Christina Rossetti, the critic William Michael Rossetti, and author Maria Francesca Rossetti.

The young Rossetti is described as self-possessed, articulate, passionate and charismatic. Like his siblings, he aspired to be a poet and attended King’s College School. However, he also was interested in painting, especially in Medieval Italian art. He attended the Antique School of the Royal Academy, leaving in 1848 to study under Ford Madox Brown, with whom he retained a close relationship throughout his life.

He became interested in meeting William Holman Hunt after viewing Hunt’s painting The Eve of St. Agnes, and another lifelong friendship developed. The two became close friends, and together they developed the philosophy of the Pre-Raphaelites.

For many years Rossetti worked on English translations of Italian poetry including Dante Alighieri’s La Vita Nuova. These translations and Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur inspired his art of the 1850s. He created his own method of painting in watercolors, using thick pigments mixed with gum to give effects similar to medieval illuminations.

The Pre-Raphaelites’ intention was to reform English art by rejecting what they considered to be the mechanistic approach, first adopted by the Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphael and Michelangelo. They wanted to return to the abundant detail, intense color, and complex compositions of Quattrocento Italian and Flemish art. In their attempt to revive the brilliance of color found in this art, they painted in thin glazes of pigment over a wet white ground. They hoped that in this way their colors would retain jewel-like transparency and clarity.

Their works brought mixed reviews. The writer Charles Dickens, commenting on Millais’ painting Christ in the House of His Parents, said it was blasphemous, that Mary was ugly, and that the Holy Family looked like alcoholics and slum dwellers.  The influential critic John Ruskin, however, praised their devotion to nature and rejection of conventional methods of composition. He wrote a letter to The (London) Times defending their work and provided funds to encourage the art of Rossetti’s wife Elizabeth Siddal. 

                                                        

After 1856 Rossetti became an inspiration for the medieval look of the movement. His work influenced his friend William Morris, in whose firm Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., he became a partner. Through Morris’ company the ideals of the Pre-Raphaelites influenced many interior designers and architects, leading directly to the Arts and Crafts Movement. Rossetti later came to be seen as a precursor of the wider European Symbolist Movement.

After only sixteen months of marriage, Elizabeth Siddal died of tuberculosis and Rossetti, in despair, buried his still unpublished works in her coffin.  He was later talked into disinterring and publishing them, and his focus on the truth of modern life became a prime influence in current art. During a later phase in his work he had begun to focus on the single female figure, seen bust-length before a parapet set against a decorative background. MAG’s La Bionda del Balcone (The Blonde on the Balcony), watercolor and gouache on board, follows this pattern.

Rossetti’s inspiration for the frontal pose, exotic costume, and sensual appearance of this figure came from Italian Renaissance portraits, as did the foreground parapet and symbolic floral background.  The model’s flowing reddish hair particularly recalls women depicted by such Venetian artists as Titian. The symbolic meaning of the flowers and other accessories in this painting is especially revealing.

The marigolds that fill the background express cruelty, pain and grief, and the apple and the serpent-like armband suggest the temptation of Eve. The white roses in the model’s hair, however, symbolize both purity and perfection of beauty.

Rossetti regarded his portraits of women as physical manifestations of his soul. Originally his model and mistress Fanny Cornforth had been the model for La Bionda. She was dreamy and sensuous, full lips parted and eyes thoughtful, gazing into space. When he replaced Fanny’s portrait with generalized features, he reduced the sensuality of the image and heightened its spirituality.

Rossetti’s art was characterized by its sensuality and its medieval revivalism. His early poetry was influenced by John Keats; his later works were characterized by the complex interlocking of thought and feelings, especially in his sonnet sequence The House of Life. Poetry and image are closely entwined in his work, and he frequently wrote sonnets to accompany his pictures.

During his later years he earned a large income and lived well. He resided in a large house in Chelsea, where for a while the novelist George Meredith and the poet Swinburne lived with him. He gradually grew more morbid, however, and became a victim of insomnia and the drug chloral. He died in 1882.