Rossetti's 'For Our Lady of the Rocks": An Examination of Pre-Raphaelite Beliefs
Vilayath and Lance
In the 19th century, a
group of artists created a style and aesthetic movement that challenged the dominant
notions of beauty. This group would come to be known as the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood. This exhibit will discuss how the use of ekphrastic poetry,
particularly Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s For
‘Our Lady of the Rocks’, illuminates Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelite ideals;
ideals that not only challenged established art, but would influence an entire
new lens through which art could be viewed. This essay will prove that
Rossetti’s poem, based on Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting Our Lady of the Rocks, highlights Pre-Raphaelite beliefs that
question beauty by exploring the paradigm of beauty and morbidity. This
will be accomplished through an analysis of ekphrastic poetry and how it
enabled Rossetti to write about these attitudes that were emerging for the
Brotherhood that would come some years later. The discussion will also include
an in-depth analysis of the set of beliefs that the Pre-Raphaelites had towards
art, and Rossetti’s sonnet will be compared with the imagery of Da Vinci’s
painting. Thus, a clear example of how the Pre-Raphaelites viewed the world and
how they accomplished making artistic choices based on these perceptions will
be provided in the course of this exhibit. |
Ekphrastic poetry and how it enabled Rossetti to express his impressions of Da Vinci’s painting must be analyzed in order to introduce the Pre-Raphaelite notions that not only influenced aesthetic tastes in Victorian society, but also influenced contemporary society’s outlook on art. The ekphrastic spectator, as Benton states, reads poems , “which, in turn are reading paintings or sculptures; and maybe, doing so from the position of knowing the visual work before the poem; or maybe, of coming to it as a result of the poem; or maybe, of ‘reading’ the visual work through or alongside or against the poem’s ‘reading’ of it”. |
Rossetti's 'For Our Lady of the Rocks": An Examination of Pre-Raphaelite Beliefs
Vilayath and Lance
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The ekphrastic poem acts as a literary medium for a visual piece of art. The poet chooses to convey not only their interpretation of the visual, but their perspective of the sensual feelings from the work as well. ‘Choice’ is an important word to note because it highlights the fact that the poet includes and excludes certain information about the visual work that they feel is important in order to convey a particular reading; it is not simply a regurgitation of the visual work in literary form. This ‘choice’ is very important to understanding Rossetti and his Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The Pre-Raphaelites challenged the established “academic” understanding of visual art, an understanding that succeeded the artist Raphael, hence their name Pre-Raphaelite. They felt the common and frequent compositions, which many artists of their time worked according to, numbed the public to accept this stale and stationary position in which visual art was stuck in. The brotherhood formed from individuals that sought to challenge and reject those “academic” notions. The expression of this hope for a new perspective of beauty was conveyed in their work that followed. |
In regard to the choice of poem, it is important to note that Da
Vinci was quite literally Pre-Raphael, thus fulfilling the Pre-Raphaelite
nature of his poem. Moreover, Da Vinci was a famous, household artist who
was widely recognized.This idea is further emphasized with the fact that
Rossetti wrote this poem after viewing the painting in the National Gallery in
London. The Brotherhood hoped to influence not a small group peers, but
an entire following. Much of their disgust stemmed from the disregard and
treatment of late, great artists; artists who were highly influential and
famous. It was these great artists who, The Brotherhood felt, were being
publicly shamed by the Academy’s stale, limited and passionless view of beauty
and artistic taste. Da Vinci’s painting was in display at the National
Academy, and after viewing it, Rossetti wrote his poem. He chose a famous
artist, a household name, a work people can see for themselves, to remind the
public that these great artists of the past should not and cannot be stuck in
the academy’s stale understanding of their work. They must be revisited
and more creatively re-imagined. Rossetti, along with the brotherhood,
wanted to change the way people understood what art could represent. Thus, it
is logical that he chose to write about art that people would know and can see
firsthand. It is apparent that part of Rossetti’s motivation for his work
was in conjunction with the Brotherhood and his passion to change the hearts of
his artistic society, but the influences on his own work were just as important
as the influences for his cause.
Rossetti and his
likeminded peers did not necessarily need to go hundreds of years into
the past in search of influential artists who agreed with them. As
Ormond states, the Rossetti brothers together bought one of William
Blake’s notebooks@Ormond, Leonee. "Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Old Masters." Yearbook of English Studies. 36.2 (2006): 153-168. Print. Page 155., and found that he shared the same
distaste for the Royal Academy as they did, going on to state Blake
“would certainly have joined the Pre-Raphaelites ‘anti-slosh’
campaign”@Ibid.. This was a very important time for Rossetti
because it reaffirmed and gave credence to the Brotherhood’s stand.
Blake was a poet that Rossetti held in high regard, and to share a
seemingly coincidental yet strong and passionate outlook with such a
well established and respected poet fuelled Rossetti’s mission.
Moreover, Rossetti himself saw himself in some respects an outcast and
introvert as illustrated in the question-filled, cerebral nature of his
poems, and may have found motivation in sharing causes with a poet that
Ormond describes as “the great outsider of the previous
generation”. Rossetti would pursue this Blakean position with his
peers and eventually develop his own unique perspective and position in
the same fashion as he preached for artistic society. |
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Rossetti's 'For Our Lady of the Rocks": An Examination of Pre-Raphaelite Beliefs
Vilayath and Lance
In Rossetti’s ekphrastic art based off of Leonardo Da
Vinci’s, one may be able to view many processes being shown. For one thing, the
content on display in Da Vinci’s art is co-opted by Rossetti, who draws an
arguably different inspiration from the content than either Leonardo or any of
his contemporaries may have either intended or gotten from the painting. The
Madonna was a revered and holy biblical figure, a cherished image that gave a
chaste, impossible birth to the Messiah, which was a happy and wondrous
miracle. Rossetti’s gaze, however, morphs these impressions, and results in his
wording of the Madonna as being a sad person, a figure caught in a sort of
underworld, suffering forever in this picture under the gaze of what he
considers an “occult”. Rossetti’s twists the meaning of Heaven, changing it
into merely a “long day”, a pessimistic view of what Christians hold dear as
being salvation. To Rossetti, Christ lays his blessings “silently”, because he
is victim to the same vices, foibles, and human faults as the rest of humanity.
“Even Jesus would get bored of eternity,” Rossetti seems to be conveying.
Indeed, one should note how the tone of Da Vinci’s work changes before and
after the impressions laid out in Rossetti’s sonnet. |
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Another process at work here is the laying out for the foundation of what the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood meant to set out on in their collective work. At the time, Rossetti was merely in the beginning stages of setting out what it was he wanted to accomplish, and would one day join other of his contemporaries in attempting to materialize. This purpose, as is hinted at in the sonnet, was a concept that would endure throughout the period of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The focus of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, along with the other artists in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, was on the paradigm of beauty and morbidity. This was a feature that can be seen in various works by this group of artists, such as Ophelia by John Everett Millais and Lady Lilith by Rossetti. The former painting, of a drowned lady awash in murky waters, was an attempt by Millais to capture how a woman could still be beautiful, perhaps even more so, in death. This is an example of trying to bring beauty to a normally disturbing, unpleasant concept: death. Rossetti’s painting of Lady Lilith, on the other hand, is of a woman who is brushing her hair. The lady herself is, according to mythology, the first woman to appear to the biblical figure of Adam, but was cast away when her evils nearly destroyed him. This is another example of how the Pre-Raphaelites tried to make a comparison between the beautiful and the morbid. In many cases, it was the beauty of form that uplifted the morose material. In other cases, it was the sad, longing brushwork that altered normally picturesque or beautiful content into a more hushed response from the audience. |
Rossetti's 'For Our Lady of the Rocks": An Examination of Pre-Raphaelite Beliefs
Vilayath and Lance
In conclusion, this
exhibit has highlighted the various processes in which Dante Gabriel
Rossetti exercised his artistic views and passions. His method, the
use of ekphrastic poetry coupled with constant discussions of the
paradigm of beauty and morbidity, illustrate his own inner questioning
of the divine and mortality, a struggle that was greatly portrayed
within the tensions of his work. These tensions sprung from his public
effort to reject the academic perspective of art and recreate an
understanding of art that explored and broke free of the boundaries the
Victorian artistic society considered of good artistic taste. Paying
great respect and reverence to the celebrated artist before Raphael,
Rossetti was also motivated by the shared perspective of prominent
artists of his own time, namely William Blake, a point that would
reaffirm his position and encourage him to continue his cause. In his
association with a brotherhood of likeminded artists and poets,
Rossetti developed a perspective which fulfilled his goals of
changing the established understanding of art to make way for a
community unafraid to view, create, and redefine beauty and art. |
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Rossetti's 'For Our Lady of the Rocks": An Examination of Pre-Raphaelite Beliefs
Vilayath and Lance
Endnotes
1 Ormond, Leonee. "Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Old Masters." Yearbook of English Studies. 36.2 (2006): 153-168. Print. Page 155.
2 Ibid.
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