An Examination of the Female in Dante Gabriels the Girlhood of Mary Virgin - Essay Example

? An Examination of the Female in Dante Gabriel’s The Girlhood of Mary Virgin An Examination of the Female in Dante Gabriel’s The Girlhood of Mary Virgin I. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Girlhood of Mary Virgin The artwork The Girlhood of Mary Virgin was Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s first debut on oil painting. It was first shown in a free exhibition at the Hyde Park Corner Gallery in London gallery in March of 1849, a year later after the founding of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood whose initials “PRB” were inscribed on the painting. The painting was accompanied by sonnets which read; I. This is that blessed Mary, pre-elect, God's Virgin. Gone is a great while, and she Dwelt young in Nazareth of Galilee. Unto God's will she brought devout respect, Profound simplicity of intellect, And supreme patience. From her mother's knee Faithful and hopeful; wise in charity; Strong in grave peace; in pity circumspect. So held she through her girlhood; as it were An angel-watered lily, that near God Grows and is quiet. Till, one dawn at home, She woke in her white bed, and had no fear At all, -- yet wept till sunshine, and felt awed; Because the fullness of the time was come. II. “These are the symbols. On that cloth of red I’ the centre is the Tripoint: perfect each, Except the second of its points, to teach That Christ is not yet born. The books – whose head Is golden Charity, as Paul hath said – Those virtues are wherein the soul is rich: Therefore on them the lily standeth, which Is innocence, being interpreted. The seven-thorn’d briar and the pal seven-leaved Are her great sorrow and her great reward. Until the end be full, the Holy One Abides without. She soon shall have achieved Her perfect purity: yea, God the Lord Shall soon vouchsafe His Son to be her Son1. The Girlhood of Mary contains strong religious symbolism. The choice of the objects as well as their arrangements related to the characters made the painting almost a religious instruction with the density of pious symbolisms in the artwork. The Girlhood of Mary also epitomises feminine excellence during the Victorian age. It symbolizes the ideal feminine during the Pre-Raphaelite period which should be pure and home centered2. II. Dante Gabriel Rossetti the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti was born in London, England on May 12, 1828 with the given name of Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti. His mother was Frances Polidori and his father was Gabriel Rossetti who as a poet had a partiality towards the works of the poet Dante Alighieri that he gave his first son the same namesake. Later, Rossetti put the Dante first ahead of his birth name Gabriel in honour of the poet he was named after. Dante’s early works were said to be mirrored in the earlier works of Rossetti3. Dante Gabriel Rossetti had three other siblings (whom he was the eldest) who were equally talented. His other sibling, Cristina was also a poet just like her brother Dante Gabriel who sat as the Virgin Mary in the paintings of Dante Gabriel The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini. III. The Victorian Female during Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s time Dante Gabriel Rossetti (12 May 1828 – 9 April 1882) was born during the reign of Queen Victoria who was the Queen of England from 1837 to 1901. During the reign of Queen Victoria (known as Victorian era), the idea of ideal feminine was patterned after the queen herself. The respectability and figure of the ideal lady during the era of Queen Victoria surrounds around domestic purity as she dispenses her duty as a wife, mother and daughter 4(BBC 2004). This era is characterized as the domestic age as femininity was centered on family as epitomized by Queen Victoria who was the role model of marital stability and domestic virtue5. This social milieu during Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s time may have tremendously influenced his early works especially his first public oil painting The Girlhood of Mary when he describes his idea of lady to be innocent and pure; This concept of womanhood stressed woman’s purity and selflessness. Protected and enshrined within the home, her role was to create a place of peace where man could take refuge from the difficulties of modern life6. Such, Rossetti’s poetry and painting encapsulate the desire and pursuit of a man to find Beauty and Love. Although critics of Rossetti viewed this as a limitation of his works, Rossetti’s paintings and poetry nevertheless reflected what the ideal female was during his time; that is of purity and innocence. Having this as a standard of ideal feminine during the Pre-Raphaelite Period, It is not a coincidence why Dante Gabriel’s sister Cristina sat as a model for the Virgin Mary. Dante thought highly of his sister that she was even considered as an influential figure of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood whose members were mostly men7. IV. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed a year before the public exhibition of The Girlhood of Mary which had the inscription “PRB” which stood as the initial of the brotherhood whom Rossetti cofounded along with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. The brotherhood’s influence in the painting The Girlhood of Mary was undeniable considering that the masterpiece was painted in the studio of Hunt8. The brotherhood was composed of English painters and poets who wanted to veer and defy all conventions of art. Their primary purpose was “left unsaid by reason of its fundamental necessity, … was to make Art a handmaid in the cause of justice and truth9”. The brotherhood can also be said as a group of artists who protested the “the low standards of British art” and the turning away from “the growing materialism of Industrialized England10”. Its style emphasizes precision, with an almost photographic representation and lush details of every subject. The brotherhood also stressed that in looking for new subjects, they should draw upon the works of Shakespeare, Keats and Tennyson, of which the latter was known to have a tremendous aesthetic influence on the Pre-Raphaelite art form with his work Lady Shalott11. V. The female in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Girlhood of the Mary Virgin Without doubt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s first public oil painting The Girlhood of Mary has religious theme and symbolisms. In the visual rendering of the painting, it already impressed some sort of religiosity although it may not be that obvious until one interprets the symbolisms in the artwork and associate the description of the sonnets inscribed at the bottom of the frame. In addition, the production of another painting of the Virgin Mary in the succeeding year which is the Ecce Ancilla Domini which depicted the Annunciation of Angel Gabriel to Mary that she is about to have an immaculate conception confirms the religious anthem of the painting12. Donnelly aptly described that Dante Gabriel’s Rossetti’s idea of “female’s excellence” such as the depiction of a woman and her femininity in his first major public painting The Girlhood of Mary Virgin is pure, innocent and clean13. In The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, Rossetti’s elevation of the female as a subject transcended beyond her aesthetic beauty of which Rossetti was known to be enamoured and included her sanctity as a woman to the point that she belonged to the deity. This may have been attributed to the various influences of Rossetti’s social milieu during the Victorian era where the female is idealized as pure and innocent where Rossetti lavished it with religious theme in his first two works (The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini) to stress further how much he esteemed the female. The painting can also be taken as a sort of stereotyping the females during the Pre-Raphaelite era. That is, conveying in painting and sonnet the idea of a Victorian “stunner” which suggests that “she should be fair, demure, modest maiden with her innocence14”. The manner of which the subjects (Mary and St. Anne) were conveyed was startling if not unconventional. Rossetti’s portrayal of his female subjects transcended beyond the visual but also included verbal description through sonnets that were equally beautiful and lofty. The representation of the female in Rossetti’s first two works, particularly the first (The Girlhood of Mary) to his audience was as if to educate medieval parishioners about femininity by the authority of a priest using words and pictures for those who cannot read15. The combination of this two medium goes beyond “the word-image opposition in that it consistently threatens the temporal-spatial divide through which images and texts are normally separated16”. The meanings derived from the associated of the painting and the sonnet goes beyond the regular perception of narratives that disturbs the traditional perception in art with regard to its progression and form. In a way, The Girlhood of Mary is a prelude and preparation of the Virgin Mary before she will bear the child Jesus as announced by the angel Gabriel in the Annunciation or Ecce Ancilla Domini17 . The accompanying “sonnet captured the intense segment of Rossetti’s thought and feeling18” that made the painting dense not only in the style and manner it was rendered but also in symbolism. The choice of the character in elevating the female in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Girlhood of Mary may have also been a sign of the of the Oxford or Tractarian Movement’s influence in the English culture’s resurging interest In Mary, both in poetry and painting. Both Dante Gabriel and Cristina Rossetti (who posed as the Virgin Mary in The Girlhood of Mary and Ecce Ancilla Domini) recognized the importance of Mary as a spiritual figure in the Christian ethos. The Rossetti’s know that the descendental motion of God in poetry and painting evokes profound number of possibilities of symbolism which could add to the density of symbolism in The Girlhood of Mary Virgin19. Symbolisms in The Girlhood of Mary Virgin Rossetti’s painting The Girlhood of Mary is dense with symbolism. Almost every person and object in the painting suggests some form of symbolism and was not just placed in the painting just to serve a singular aesthetic purpose. The most noticeable symbolism in the painting is the mentoring of Mary’s mother, St. Anne. Typically, tutorship involves homeschooling that required a student to read. In the case The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, Mary was embroidering instead of reading. There are books in the painting but instead of being read, they were symbolically placed in stack20. St. Anne was watching her daughter doing the embroidery as would a mother to a daughter in a domestic setting but “Mary’s gaze is drawn to the lily which is being tended by the child angel21 which suggests that she is predestined for holiness and her pure state. The arrangement and usage of these objects were due to Rossetti’s sensitivity of the social and political atmosphere during his period where the education of the female should be consistent with the idea of a Victorian feminine that should be centered in the home. Books would be offensive because it would be tantamount to preparing Mary to meddle in the affairs of men by teaching her about the affairs of the world. It has to be understood that during the Pre-Raphaelite era, respectability of women is judged not through her career but on how she attends the home. Such, embroidery would make a suitable preparation for Mary, not only for the purpose of depicting her in the paint but also to be politically correct in the painting. Grieve elaborated the other objects in the painting as; The books representing the virtues are coloured symbolically. The lamp is an emblem of piety, the rose is the flower of the Madonna. The vine refers to the coming of Christ and the red cloth, embroidered with the Tri-point, beneath the cross-shaped trellis, symbolizes His robe at the Passion. The palm and thorn shaped branches prefigure the seven joys and seven sorrows of the Virgin22 Again, purity is reinforced in the painting with the presence of the lily especially when it was grown in a pot tended by the Angel Gabriel who would also be a character in the next related painting Ecce Ancilla Domini when He announces to Mary that she would be the bearer of the Son of God. The dove in the painting is obviously religious as it symbolizes the Holy Spirit among Christians. The vine suggests truth and even the colours of the books of which the lily pot stood was also emblematic of Christian values such as gold for charity and green for hope23. The arrangement of these objects, where Mary’s gaze is drawn to the purity of the lily that is attended by an angel over a stack of books which symbolizes Christian virtues is evident of religiosity where the female played a central figure. Bentley added that the painting in itself is “constructed on centered on the wooden trellis. The internal composition is constructed around the horizontal plane drawn by the line between Mary and the angel, and the vertical one of St. Joachim and the red robe on the balustrade24”. This suggests further the secular symbolism about the religious importance of women that is consistent with Christian ethos that she should be pure being the bearer of Christ. The Girlhood of Mary Virgin beyond the religion The painting could also be a reflection of how Rossetti was enamoured towards the female and an attempt to fulfil his dream in his relationship with Elizabeth Siddal (who was Rossetti’s mistress and later his wife), his mistress Fanny Cornforth, and Jane Morris (who is the wife of his friend William Morris) who embodied the idea of a “Pre-Raphaelite stunner25”. This tendency of Rossetti to be particularly attached to his subject is not remote given the tremendous influence of Dante Alighieri on Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Rossetti was named after Aligheri’s in the first place and Rossetti even reversed his name to make the “Dante” in his name more pronounced in honour of the great poet he was named after. Dante Alighieri during his time showed an unusual attachment to his subject Beatrice who was made into character in his most important works. This attachment could be considered fatal as Dante even withdrew into serious study after Beatrice died at an early age of 24. Beatrice was then relived in Dante’s works such as Vita Nuova, Divine Comedy, Paradiso and Purgatorio which analysts interpreted as Dante’s attempt to fulfil his dreams with Beatrice26. Rossetti’s “Dantesque” tendency can be reflected with the fact that he was exposed early to the works of Alighieri when he was still under the tutelage of his father who was also very much attached to the works of Alighieri. In fact, the inversion of Rossetti’s name from Gabriel Dante to Dante Gabriel was Rossetti’s own decision to honour the poet whom he was named after. He was not also schooled in the arts unlike his two cofounder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais who were trained in the Royal Academy of Arts. If this is the case, the female’s elevation in Rossetti’s work would be inevitable given the importance of Beatrice’s character in Dante’s works (Vita Nuova, Divine Comedy, Paradiso and Purgatorio) which had enormous influence in Rossetti. If Rossetti is doing a Dante among his models, particularly doing a Beatrice on Elizabeth Siddal which was subconsciously depicted as Mary in The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, it would not be surprising that the females in his early paintings will be elevated to the height of divinity in his artworks. Dante’s Beatrice was his guide in his most important work Divine Comedy as he traversed through hell. Metaphorically, the character that Dante assigned to Beatrice is gravely serious because it suggests Beatrice to be a sort of saviour in Dante’s hell just as Dante assigned women to be the mother of the saviour Jesus Christ in Christian doctrine in his work The Girlhood of Mary Virgin. Rossetti’s blessed virgin present in his poems and paintings can also be said as a reflection of Dante’s Beatrice27. The elevation of women in Rossetti’s The Girlhood of Mary as a pure and beautiful damsel may also have been due to Tennyson’s influence to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of which The Girlhood of Mary painting had been inscribed with the brotherhood’s initials. Tennyson’s poem had such an impact on the aesthetics of the brotherhood’s art particularly the idea of his famous work “Lady Shalott” whose dead body sailed towards Camelot after bearing the Curse of directly looking at Lancelot (she had the cursed that she should not look directly on the outside the world). Upon reaching Camelot, Lancelot was awed by her beauty and offered her prayer. According to Jeffers, the significance of Tennyson to Rossetti may have been in the manner that Lancelot “is shown gazing at the dead Lady of Shalott, just as Rossetti would gaze at beauty, especially feminine beauty, and transform it into art28”. VI. Conclusion The female in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Girlhood of Mary Virgin Mary can be interpreted as a product of the many influences that shaped Rossetti both as a man and as an artist. All of these influences in Rossetti however redound to his interpretation of the female as esteemed at least by Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite standards. Using his sister Christina as a model to sit and give Mary life in the painting is telling that the female is depicted of the highest respectability in this particular work of Dante. No man in whatever epoch or cultural context would use a family member as a model that would represent an artwork that is far from the ideal. Examining Rossetti closer and including all of his works in an attempt to better understand the female in the particular work The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, it revealed Rossetti’s varying levels of attachment to the female. His later work revealed sensuality of the female subject29 which is contrary to the depiction of his female in his early works which were pure and innocent. Being such, it can be safely concluded that among the various depiction and rendering of the female in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s artwork, she is most esteemed in The Girlhood of Mary Virgin as her excellence as a female was best portrayed in this particular work. She is elevated not only to the level of the deity but also epitomized the ideals of a Victorian lady as described both in the visuals of the painting and the description of the sonnet. Rossetti’s power and achievement of his language both visually and literally may be undeniable but his “greater contribution as artist and poet is to those who came after him. Rossetti reawakened the artist to the glories of word and colour that had dimmed in the hands of many in his time30”. Bibliography ABRAMS, LYNN, “Ideals of Womanhood in Victorian Britain” (web page)(2001), [accessed April 15, 2012] ARMSTRONG, ISOBEL, “D. G. Rossetti and Christina Rossetti as Sonnet Writers”, Victorian Poetry, 48/4(2010),461-473. BBC HISTORY, “Women and Urban Life in Victorian Britain”, (webpage)(2004) [accessed April 15, 2012] BBC HISTORY, “The Girlhood of Mary Virgin”, (webpage)(2012) [accessed April 15, 2012]. BENTLEY, D.M.R., “Pre-Raphaelite Typology”, University of Toronto Quarterly, 78/3(2009), 821-850 Columbia Electronic Encyclopaedia (6th Edition:, Reading Level Lexile, “Pre-Raphaelites”, 2011), 1-1. COOPER, ROBYN, “The Relationship Between The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Painters Before Raphael in English Criticism of the Late 1840s and 1850s”, Victorian Studies, 24/4(1981), 405-438. CULLARI, MICHELLE A., “Every Rose has its Thorn: The Complex Nature of the Female in Gabriel Rossetti’s Paintings and Poetry”, Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the department of English, Seton Hall University, 2004. DONNELLY, BRIAN, “Sonnet--Image--Intertext: Reading Rossetti's The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and Found”, Victorian Poetry, 48/4(2010), 475-488. JEFFERS, THOMAS L., “Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott and Pre-Raphaelite Renderings: Statement and Counter-Statement”, Religion & the Arts, 6/3 (2002), 231-256. LANDOW, GEORGE P., “Pre-Raphaelites: An Introduction”, (webpage)(2007), < http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/prb/1.html> [accessed April 16, 2012] MARSH, J. Pre-Raphaelite Women: Images of Femininity in Pre-Raphaelite Art (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987). ORLANDO, EMILY J. ““That I May not Faint, or Die, or Swoon”: Reviving Pre-Raphaelite Women”, Women's Studies, 38/6 (2009), 611-646. PETERSON, LINDA H., “Restoring the Book: The Typological Hermeneutics of Christina Rossetti and the PRB”, Victorian Poetry, 32/3/4, Centennial of Christina Rossetti: 1830-1894 pp. 209-232. READY, KATHRYN, “Reading Mary as Reader: The Marian Art of Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti”, Victorian Poetry, 46/2(2008), 151-174. ROSETTI, DANTE GABRIEL, Sonnet for the painting The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, First shown in a free exhibition at the Hyde Park Corner Gallery in London gallery in March of 1849. Read More