| Dante Gabriel Rossetti created hundreds of feminine figures as the principal subjects of his paintings and poems, most often portraying them as spiritual, literary, or mythological characters. His feminine types reflect the models of Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque artists and iconographers, who portrayed feminine characters of two classifications: spiritually beautiful saints, madonnas, and virgins and physically beautiful Magdalenes, Salomes, and Bathshebas. Rossetti designated two types of feminine figures in "Soul's Beauty" and "Body's Beauty," two sonnets for pictures (numbers 77 and 78 in The House of Life) inscribed on the frames of Sibylla Palmifera and Lady Lilith, his paintings of the personifications of the two categories. Rossetti associated spiritually beautiful women with innocence and spiritually beautiful but deviant types with experience. A number of his feminine characters undergo transitions from innocence to experience. His later works center on the reconciliation of spiritual and physical beauty in the ideal perfection of a goddess or courtly beloved. This dissertation chronicles Rossetti's poetic and artistic experiments with "Soul's Beauty" and "Body's Beauty," arguing that his mature works from the late 1860s onward center on the reconciliation of spiritual and physical beauty in the ideal beloved. |
