Terza e ultima parte della
presentazione del modulo
della prof.ssa Gabrieli
I Preraffaelliti
The Pre-Raphaelites
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THE PRE-RAPHAELITE
BROTHERHOOD
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
John Everett Millais
William Holman Hunt
Thomas Woolner
William Michael Rossetti
James Collinson
Frederick Stephens
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John Ruskin
Ford Madox Brown
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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 make
Of crowflowers, 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 crownet 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;
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element. But long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To 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-andcheese 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 means
The 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, Selfportrait
E.Siddal, Selfportrait
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 diletto
di Lancialotto come amor lo strinse:
soli eravamo e sanza alcun sospetto.
Per più fiate gli occhi ci sospinse
quella 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 baciata
1859
“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, PreRaphaelitism, 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”
Monna
Vanna
1866
il titolo allude a
Madonna
Giovanna,la
donna amata
da Guido
Cavalcanti
Lady Lilith
Regina
cordium
1866
The beloved
1865
Venus Verticordia
1864-66
Jane Burden
Jane Burden
Jane Burden
Jane Burden
Proserpina
1874
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
damozel
1873-78
• “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).