Rossetti Beata Beatrix

Rosetti is known as a poet and a painter. Now he will be married to Elizabeth Siddell, the same model we saw for Ophelia, but she dies young of an opium overdose. So she also is one of the major models of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but either way she will be incredibly influential on all of his art, especially after her death. Images of the ethereal beauty are frequently centered on his late wife, in fact when you see a female in most of Rosetti's paintings, it's going to be Elizabeth Siddell. And he will create Beata Beatrix. Now ostensibly this is a portrait of Beatrice from Dante's Divine Comedy, but in reality it serves as a memorial to his wife Elizabeth Siddell. So let's look at the piece itself. The Red Dove is a messenger for love and death and consequently delivers a poppy, a symbol of sleep and death to her, a symbol of the opium overdose. So right here we already have symbols of love, death, and opium overdose all at once. We also see the sundial, and this is going to be a metaphor for time, time overall. In the background we have Virgil walking around and we see this idea of the Eternal City. It's actually a depiction of Florence with a pyramid kind of out of place. We see a well, sort of a concept, a well of souls, all of it is getting at this memorialization of his wife. Stylistically it's very loose. It almost looks like it's done in colored pencil, but in fact it's being done in oil paints. He's again using glazes and he's using so much glaze in his paint that it leaves heavy marks on either side of any mark he makes, creating this sort of colored pencil feel. It gives it an ethereal sense as if what we're seeing is something spiritual, something from another realm. Compositionally it's very simple and straightforward. It's very much a Renaissance portrait. We see her in the foreground idealized, much like we would see the Mona Lisa or a portrait by Filippo Lippi. The composition overall follows that idea with the deep space in the background, detail in the background, giving us a sense of the story. But without the story, we still get that sense of memorialization. Yes, it's supposed to be Beatrice from Dante's Divine Comedy, but the reality is something very different. That's where we get into these ideas of biographical context, where understanding the life of the artist informs how we understand their art, much like Goya and Saturn devouring one of his children.