Exhibit:

Feminine Archetype: Mother

Preview of images

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, La Pia De' Tolomei (1868-1880)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Virgin Mary Being Comforted (1852).
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Mrs. Gabriele Rossetti (1877)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849).

Part of Group:

Rossetti Archive Exhibits

The following exhibit includes reformatted content from The Rossetti Archive, now made available for reassembly through the the COVE database. The content is open access but you need to subscribe to reassemble material into new collections at COVE. We have created exhibits based thematic elements to illustrate how Rossetti Archive content can be reassembled in interesting ways. This particular exhibit, one of three on Femine Archetypes, concentrates on The Mother.

Images in this Exhibit

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, La Pia De' Tolomei (1868–1880)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, La Pia De' Tolomei (1868-1880)

A variant of this description was originally published at The Rossetti Archive. 

Scholarly Commentary

Introduction

Based on the story of the Lady of Siena as told in Dante Alighieri's Purgatorio (V. 130-136), the painting bears within itself an oblique allusion to the relations between Jane Morris, her husband William, and their close friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Jane sat for this portrait of La Pia, who was imprisoned and murdered by her husband in 1295 in a...
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Virgin Mary Being Comforted (1852)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Virgin Mary Being Comforted (1852).

A variant of this description was originally published at The Rossetti Archive.

Scholarly Commentary

Introduction

This is one of the many Marian pictures and poems that Dante Gabriel Rossetti created in the late 1840s and early to mid-1850s. The sketch for the virtually finished pencil drawing has on its back a study for The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice in Paradise. The contiguity underscores the close relation Rossetti saw in his pursuit of his Marian and his Beatricean...
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Mrs. Gabriele Rossetti (1877)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Mrs. Gabriele Rossetti (1877)

A variant of this description was originally published at The Rossetti Archive.

Scholarly Commentary

Introduction

According to Surtees, this is the last portrait Dante Gabriel Rossetti made of his mother. It was completed during his recuperative stay at Hunter's Forestall, Kent (Surtees 188).

See the commentary for the early drawing and the later finished oil as well as Rossetti's letter to his brother of 28 September 1877 where he says he has “commenced a...
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849).

A variation of this description was originally published at The Rossetti Archive.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's own description of the work, given in a 14 November 1848 letter to Charles Lyell, is primary: “It belongs to the religious class which has always appeared to me the most adapted and the most worthy to interest the members of a Christian community. The subject is the education of the Blessed Virgin, one which has been treated at various times by Murillo and other painters,—but, as I cannot...