Appendix 2

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) Proserpina (1874)

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s haunting depiction of Proserpina is both beautiful and symbolic. In Rossetti’s painting Proserpina is represented holding a pomegranate, which has been partially consumed. Of the painting Rossetti wrote:

[Proserpina] 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 sight of the upper world; and she glances furtively towards it, immersed in thought. The incense-burner stands beside her as an attribute of a goddess. The ivy branch in the background may be taken as a symbol of clinging memory.

The model for Rosetti’s compelling image was Jane Morris, wife of Rossetti’s friend and fellow artist, William Morris. Of all Rossetti’s depictions of Jane Morris, Proserpina perhaps most strongly coveys Rossetti’s obsession with her archetypal ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ looks; the rich, raven hair suggests female sexuality and yet at the same time the portrait captures his ideals of spiritual love nurtured by his constant reading of Dante. Rossetti’s obsession with ‘Proserpina’ inspired four versions of the same image: the primary version dated 1877 (Paul Getty Jnr); a second dated 1874 (Tate Gallery); a full-scale version in coloured chalks on paper inscribed ‘Proserpina’ (47 x 22 inches, 119.5 ^x 56 cm) signed and dated 1880 and the final oil painting of 1882 (Birmingham Museum Art Gallery).

Unable to decide as a young man whether to concentrate on painting or poetry, Rossetti’s work is infused with his poetic imagination and an individual interpretation of literary sources. Rossetti’s accompanying sonnet to this work, ‘Proserpina’, written in Italian on the reverse side of the artist’s full-scale image in coloured chalks, in one of Rossetti’s most puzzling poems. A Petrarchan sonnet with a strict rhyme scheme, it is a poem of longing, carrying an inescapable allusion to his desire to seduce Jane from her unhappy marriage to William Morris. Although it is based on the Proserpina myth, there are clear differences. Like Goethe, Rossetti imbues Proserpina with a melancholy that reveals her inner conflict, her longing for her mother’s world, despite her acknowledgement that Hades is where she belongs:

Proserpina

Afar away the light that brings cold cheer
Unto this wall, -one instant and no more
Admitted at my distant palace-door
Afar the flowers of Enna from this drear
Dire fruit, which, tasted once, must thrall me here.
Afar those skies from this Tartarean grey
That chills me and afar how far away,
The nights that shall become the days that were.

Afar from mine own self I seem, and wing
Strange ways in thought, and listen for a sign:
And still some heart unto some soul doth pine,
O whose sounds mine inner sense in fain to bring
Continually together murmuring –
‘Woe me for thee, unhappy Proserpine’
     Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1880)