Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Mimesis Potolsky

The Substance of Shadows: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Mimesis
Author(s): MATTHEW POTOLSKY

Source: Victorian Poetry, Vol. 50, No. 2 (SUMMER 2012), pp. 167-187
Published by: West Virginia University Press
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The Substance of Shadows: Dante
Gabriel Rossetti and Mimesis
MATTHEW POTOLSKY
"You knew that figure, when painted, had been seen;

yet it was not a thing to be seen of men."
-Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "Hand and Soul" (1850)1
At that thethatpoetry
poetryendhasofhistorically
has his historically
exercised 1883 essay onfunctions.
two distinct exercised "ItDante Gabriel
may," he two distinct Rossetti, functions. Walter "It Pater may," notes he
writes, "reveal, it may unveil to every eye, the ideal aspects of common things
... or it may actually add to the number of motives poetic and uncommon in
themselves, by the imaginative creation of things that are ideal from their very
birth." While Rossetti, according to Pater, made significant contributions to
the poetry of common things, his most characteristic work lay "in the adding
to poetry of fresh poetic material, of a new order of phenomena."2 Earlier in
the essay, Pater had suggested that Rossetti's chief gift in this regard is his "sin-
cerity" (p. 206), the ability to find exact poetic equivalents for certain private
inner states. Yet because the "peculiar phase of soul" the poem reproduces
is known to the poet alone, it can be grasped only by way of its poetic imita-
tion (p. 207). Pater's figure for this paradox is suggestive: it is, he says, akin to
the way "a well-trained hand can follow on the tracing-paper the outline of
an original drawing below it" (p. 206). This image displaces the opposition
between the original and the copy that dominates traditional accounts of
mimesis, for it attributes the precision of detail conventionally associated with
a strictly mimetic poetry (the tracing-paper) to a style that begins not with the
real but with another work of art (the original drawing), a work that cannot
be known apart from the traced copy. Rossetti's poetry faithfully reproduces
a world unknowable by any other means. It is referential, but paradoxically
describes a referent that can be grasped in no other way.
Rossetti never composed extended theoretical treatises, unlike so many
other writers in his intellectual milieu, but he did, as Jerome McGann notes,
treat his poetry and painting as a rigorous form of theoretical practice. His
works draw on traditional forms and conventions but incessantly manipu-
late them to explore the nature of artistic production, dissemination, and
response.3 These works may not seem obviously radical to artistic sensibilities
167
168 / VICTORIAN POETRY
trained by modernist and post-modernist experimentation, but they are no

less powerful in their questioning of entrenched theoretical traditions. Taking
McGann's observation and Pater's image of the tracing paper as my start-
ing points, I want to look in what follows at Rossetti's manipulation of the
traditional theory of mimesis in a number of works that specifically evoke it.
My two central examples will be the important early painting, The Girlhood of
Mary Virgin (1849; Tate Britain), and the short poem "Aspecta Medusa" (1870).
These works powerfully reframe the Platonic opposition between art and the
real. Far more than a stereotypically "aestheticist" reversal of mimesis- art over
reality, the copy over the original, the artificial over the natural- Rossetti in
these works radically questions Plato's insistence on the fundamental unreality
of art and literature. They are akin to Pater's tracing paper: manifest copies
that have the paradoxical status of originals.
According to Plato's canonical claim, works of art mime the appearance
of something else and do not have a specific nature of their own. They are
reducible to the function of illustration or expression, of depicting reality
or conveying images of behavior worthy (or more often unworthy) of emula-
tion. "The maker of the phantom, the imitator," Plato writes in the Republic ,
"understands nothing of what is, but rather of what looks like it is."4 Either
mirror or messenger, the work is inevitably lacking, secondary and dependent.
It tries in vain to depict the real but is not real itself. Rossetti's works inces-
santly evoke the traditional theory of mimesis: mirrors, shadows, doubles,
and reflections- all the machinery of Platonic theory- are pervasive in both
the poetry and the painting. But these figures are never simply mimetic in
their effect or their implications. The many mirror images in Rossetti's po-
etry, J. Hillis Miller has noted, are always "somehow different from the exact
reflection" and indicate the potential slippage between the reflection and
what it reflects.5 Elizabeth Heisinger discerns a similarly uncanny play on the
relation between art and its originals in the many gothic tropes that haunt
Rossetti's stories and poems about portraits.6 Rossetti's artistic practices also
play with traditional mimetic paradigms. The "double works" and the sonnets
on pictures offer two different renderings of the same subject (a poem and a
painting), shifting attention from the relation between an imaginary copy and
a real original to the relation between two putative copies. Elizabeth Prettejohn
has pointed out that Rossetti would often paint a picture before deciding on
its title, reversing the typical relation between the pictorial image (copy) and
its mythical or historical source (original).7 And David Wayne Thomas has
argued that Rossetti's practice of creating numerous replicas of his paintings
for different patrons is more than just a means of generating sales, for Rossetti
saw the replicas as new works with their own unique merits.8
Cumulatively, these thematic and practical reworkings of mimesis fore-
ground the material quality of the work of art, its presence as an object in the
MATTHEW POTOLSKY / 169
world and as the only conceivable means, following Pater's image, of perceiving
the reality it depicts. Rossetti treats mimesis as one theory of representation
among others, not the final word on the nature of art. Turning a mirror, as it
were, on their audience, the works I will discuss encourage reflection on what
Heisinger characterizes as the act of attention. For Heisinger, Pre-Raphaelite
works both depict and encourage in their audience a new kind of attention
toward the work of art as a material object: "Rossetti pays unusual attention
to the poem's or the painting's physical making . . . and also to the unpredict-
able effects of the artwork that survive its original context to be differently
embodied (experienced and translated) by future makers. For Rossetti . . . the
poem or painting exists in the world as a semi-autonomous physical presence-
a 'thing' that is more than its temporary life as its maker's work" (Heisinger,
pp. 25-26). By making evident the material reality of the work and its "semi-
autonomous" action in the world, Rossetti challenges the habitual tendency
of viewers and readers simply to look "through" the work to its true original
(the natural world, the didactic lesson, the biographical fact). Rossetti's works
make any clear distinction between the artistic copy and such originals all but
impossible, frustrating this tendency and refocusing attention on the artwork
itself. The works become originals by default.
The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (Fig. 1), Rossetti's first completed oil painting,
depicts an adolescent Virgin learning to embroider under the mentorship of
Saint Anne.9 The model for the design on her embroidery is a lily with three
flowers, which stands on a pile of books. A young angel stands next to the
flower, while Mary's father, Saint Joachim, is pruning a grapevine- the True
Vine of Christ- just outside the room. Rossetti scatters traditional Christian
symbols throughout the painting. On the spines of the books are inscribed,
reading from bottom to top, the names of three of the four cardinal virtues
( fortitudo , temperantia , prudentia) and the three theological virtues ( spes , fides ,
caritas ). In the foreground of the painting are a seven-leaved palm and a seven-
thorned briar, bound together by a scroll inscribed with the legend "tot dolores
tot gaudia." This detail alludes to the seven joys ( gaudia ) and seven sorrows
( dolores ) of Mary. Behind the Virgin is a miniature church organ, carved with
the initial M, and the legend "O sis Laus deo " (may you be for the praise of
God).10 On the balustrade that divides the inside from the outside of the room
stand an oil lamp, a vase with a flower, a crimson cloak (emblematic of the
Robe of Christ), and a trellis in the shape of a cross- all suggestive of a church
altar (Bentley, p. 34). The trellis is covered with ivy- an allusion to the Biblical
Tree of Jesse (a traditional attribute of the Virgin Mary), which joins Mary to
the genealogical line of King David. The crimson cloak is embroidered with
two sides of a triangle, each marked with signs of the Trinity and the Holy
Ghost, with the unfinished point teaching- according to the interpretation
offered in "Mary's Girlhood (For a Picture)," which comprises two sonnets
no / VICTORIAN POETRY
Figure 1. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin , 1848-49, Tate
Gallery, London, Great Britain. Photo credit: Tate, London / Art Resource,
New York.
Rossetti attached to the frame of the work on its first exhibition- that "Christ
is not yet born" (II.4; Collected Poetry and Prose , p. 186).
Critics have long suggested that The Girlhood of Mary Virgin , despite its
apparently traditional form and subject matter, both embodies and argues
for Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic ideas, McGann calls it an "artistic manifesto"
(Dante Gabriel Rossetti , p. 30). The painting arose out of the early days of the
Pre-Raphaelite movement and was from the start a crucial touchstone in the
development of Pre-Raphaelite theory. The Brotherhood formed when Ros-
setti was beginning his work on the painting in the late 1840s, and the first
number of The Germ was printed in January 1850, just months after Rossetti's
painting was exhibited. The painting itself, as the now-familiar (but probably
exaggerated) legend goes, was something of a pedagogical project of the Pre-
Raphaelite circle. Rossetti is said to have worked under the tutelage of Holman
Hunt and Ford Madox Brown; he signed the painting with his own name
and with the mysterious "PRB" initials. While the painting takes the form of
a religious work, its aims are by no means theological. Indeed, as McGann
suggests, religion here is only the medium for Rossetti's ideas about art. The
agnostic Rossetti turns traditional symbols into aesthetic artifacts, which we
are to appreciate for their own sake, outside of a devotional context ( Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, p. 30). Rather than making a religion of art, Rossetti turns
religion into art, draining it of its conventional spiritual associations in order
to foreground its intrinsic physical beauty. McGann's claim is persuasive, but
it leaves the specific subject matter of the painting unexplained. Why would
Rossetti embody his artistic manifesto in the figure of the Virgin Mary?
In one of the most suggestive readings of The Girlhood of Mary Virgin ,
Martin Meisel has argued that the painting betrays Rossetti's anxiety about
mimesis. Overseen by her mother (much as Rossetti himself was purport-
edly overseen by Hunt and Brown), the Virgin seeks to imitate nature but
can only produce what looks to be a crude imitation. While the real lily is
painted with great fidelity, the lily Mary embroiders looks rudimentary- the
work of an apprentice rather than a master. Meisel argues that this disparity
between art and nature points to Rossetti's doubts over the ability of art to
capture the full vigor of the natural world, or to gain unmediated access to the
spiritual realm: "The relation between Art and Spirit is through Nature, and
through Nature only."11 Meisel's reading of the painting is supported by one
of the central principles of Pre-Raphaelite doctrine: the turn from academic
conventions of representation to the direct observation of nature. Rossetti
himself never unequivocally endorsed these aims, but in a letter concerning
The Girlhood of Mary Virgin that he wrote to his godfather Charles Lyell in
November of 1848, he does seem to suggest he was guided in his work by a
devotion to mimetic realism.12
But the painting points to something other than mimetic fidelity, and it
does so not by negating the aims of fidelity, but by multiplying them, radically
complicating the relation between copy and original. Cannily juxtaposing
allusions to Platonic theory and classical culture with the seemingly alien
Christian model of fidelity, Rossetti constructs a counter-history of mimesis
that foregrounds the materiality of the work, and recasts mimesis as a matter
of artistic practice rather than the relation between copy and original. For
example, the lily Mary copies is at once a natural object and something more.
Planted indoors, it grows in a bright crimson pot (the same symbolic shade
used elsewhere in the painting) and is tended by an angel with oddly pink
wings. It also stands on a pile of emblematic books, suggesting that the "book
of nature" is only one volume in, and ultimately rests upon, an entire library of
conventional associations. In this emblematic context, the lily functions as the
chief pivot point for two distinct time schemes that structure the typological
imagery of the painting: the present tense of Mary's girlhood and the future
tense of her role as the mother of Christ.13 The lily is real and present in the
room, a natural object, but it is also a typological shadow pointing toward a
spiritual meaning to be fulfilled in the future. These details confirm Herbert
Sussman's claim that Rossetti's stylistic choices in the painting "violate the
naturalistic premise" of the scene.14
The Girlhood of Mary Virgin also gestures toward two conflicting forms
of fidelity. On the one hand, Rossetti faithfully represents a domestic scene,
rendering everything from the folds of Mary's dress to the flowers of the lily
in minute detail. This is the mimetic form of fidelity Meisel observes in the
painting. But Rossetti also is faithful to the conventions of medieval art. He
draws upon traditional religious imagery and subjects, and even violates recog-
nized rules of pictorial perspective (rules he follows elsewhere), to imitate the
formal characteristics of medieval artworks. In the first instance, fidelity serves
the aims of realism, taking nature as its original, while in the second case,
fidelity serves the aims of tradition, taking other works of art as its original.
These two forms of fidelity cancel each other out, for the painting's realism
makes the medieval conventions seem primitive- even primitivist- and the
medieval conventions show realism itself to be just one convention among
others. Fidelity is, moreover, among the chief traditional attributes of the
Virgin Mary. Taken as a model for art, this attribute gains an important new
dimension. Alongside the Platonic model of representational fidelity ( imita-
no naturae ), figured in the Virgin's needlework, Rossetti poses the religious
model of devotional fidelity ( imitatio Christi), figured in the Virgin's historical
iconography. Art becomes at once a mirror of the world, a mirror for the past,
and a form of spiritual practice, defined not by its accurate reproduction of
nature, but by its abiding devotion to craft and tradition.
Perhaps the most suggestive challenge to the traditional mimetic para-
digm in the painting comes from the specific art the Virgin practices. The
choice of embroidery is, at first glance, quite odd. As Rossetti notes in his
letter to Charles Lyell, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin belongs to the traditional
subject of "the Education of the Blessed Virgin." All of the significant prior
treatments of the subject, though, depict the Virgin learning to read at the
knee of Saint Anne. Rossetti argues that his change from reading to embroidery
makes the painting more historically accurate, for reading, he suggests, is "an
occupation obviously incompatible" with the Biblical era (the books in the
scene are clearly emblematic), while embroidery would be "more probable and
at the same time less commonplace" ( Correspondence , 1:75). Although critics
have often been puzzled by it, Rossetti's idiosyncratic swerve from tradition is
supported by traditional sources on the life of Mary. While there is no reference
to reading in any of the early narratives of Mary's childhood, there are several
accounts of her textile work. According to the most important early Christian
source for details from Mary's childhood, the apocryphal Protoevangelium of
James , probably written in the second century, Mary was chosen from among
seven virgins in the temple to spin thread for the temple veil and is taking
a break from this textile work when the angel Gabriel appears to her.15 The
Golden Legend , a widely read medieval collection of saint's lives, reports that,
apart from prayer, Mary spent the third to the ninth hours of her day at the
temple weaving.16 A number of early modern paintings of Mary's childhood
represent the Virgin embroidering or teaching others to sew.
At least one implication of Rossetti's reworking of the traditional subject
is clear: Mary is being educated as an artist rather than a reader, as a producer
of beauty and not a passive recipient of it. But even given this traditional
association of the Virgin with textile work, embroidery remains a puzzling
choice. More so than painting or writing, embroidery is primarily a decorative
art, and, therefore, according to the canons of traditional art theory, chiefly
an embellishment, not a manifestly independent practice. Mary's embroidery
would seem to epitomize the belated and dependent condition of all art in Pla-
tonic theory. Weaving, sewing, and embroidering, however, are long-standing
figures for art, and in particular for women's art. The association (if often by
opposition) of text and textile, the needle and the pen or the paintbrush, is
pervasive in literary and artistic history and becomes especially important in
the nineteenth century as women began to move more prominently into the
literary and artistic public.17 Mary's embroidery suggests a parallel between
the traditionally secondary status of women's work and the traditionally
secondary status of art, pointing to alternative traditions of artistic produc-
tion that challenge the accepted order.18 Like many other male artists of the
nineteenth century, Rossetti appropriates femininity as a figure of aesthetic
opposition. Mary improbably becomes a model for an incipient challenge to
traditional notions of artistic representation and production, a stand-in for
the aims of the (predominantly male) Pre-Raphaelite movement.19 Indeed,
174 / VICTORIAN POE TRY
much like the mythical Arachne, Mary weaves the story of a god's violation
of a mortal woman: her lily anticipates the Annunciation, when she will be
"deflowered" by the Holy Spirit. Arachne is punished for her transgression
by being turned into a spider, while Mary becomes an object of devotion, but
Rossetti's scene of education in The Girlhood of Mary Virgin implicitly compares
the two women and their subversive artistic productions.20
The traditional subject upon which Rossetti embroiders in The Girlhood
of Mary Virgin is itself both old and new- a paradoxically originary embroidery.
Although the painting draws upon recognizably medieval imagery and stylis-
tic techniques, there are in fact no known medieval examples of the subject
it depicts. Indeed, the scene only became popular in the sixteenth century,
and even then was mostly rendered in church sculpture. The most famous
pictorial examples were completed during the Counter-Reformation in the
seventeenth century. While Rossetti's style may be medieval, his subject comes
from a distinctly later period. As Louis Réau notes, moreover, the scene itself
is historically impossible. According to all of the known accounts of Mary's
youth, the Virgin leaves her parents for the temple when she is three years old,
and does not depart from the temple until her marriage to Joseph when she
is an adolescent. There would be no time in Mary's life that this particular
moment could have taken place, no original for which it could be a copy.21
The scene can only be understood as an embroidery upon tradition, as a pri-
mary rather than a secondary creation. Rossetti implicitly argues that all art
might be understood as a kind of embroidery. His painting uses the threads
of prior artistic and theological traditions to create a new design. He reworks
a traditional artistic scene by means of textual evidence and complicates it
with traditional emblems that no longer serve strictly traditional purposes.
The canvas becomes an exemplary fabric- and exemplary as fabric- rather than
as a mirror or a window to some other reality. Painting here is undeniably a
"material" thing.22
Rossetti's notion of an originary embroidery joins his painting to a
tradition of interpreting art as a perfecting, rather than a copying of nature.
Art completes what nature produces or goes beyond the strict contours
defined by Plato's mimetic model.23 This notion of mimesis as production,
not simply reproduction, is implicit in Aristotle's reworking of the Platonic
paradigm, but it finds its most resonant critical adumbration, for Rossetti at
least, in the Renaissance notion of art as a second nature. Rossetti's painting
thematizes this artistic ideal in Mary's horticultural artistic subject (the lily),
and in a suggestive juxtaposition this subject sets up between Mary and her
father. Although Saint Anne is Mary's most obvious mentor, there is a clear
parallel between the artistic work of the Virgin and the horticultural work
of Saint Joachim- a parallel highlighted by Rossetti's archaizing distortion of
perspective. Much as Saint Joachim weaves vines to create a design, so the
Virgin weaves threads to create an image. Both gardening and embroidery in

the painting are complexly semiotic rather than simply mimetic activities.24
Saint Joachim creates designs with nature, in cooperation with it, rather than
imitating its forms. These designs are clearly artistic, but there is no ontological
distinction between his artistic medium and his artistic practice, no tenable
opposition between the original and the copy. Although the Virgin imitates a
lily, her work is also productive of something new. It is a "material" thing, akin
to nature, and not simply a medium for the presentation of something real.
In a letter to his brother William from 1851, Rossetti claims that his
"picture should be described as the 'Girlhood' & by no means 'Education'"
(Correspondence f 1: 185). Rossetti's statement refers to the genre of the painting,
not to the content of the scene, and it should not obviate the significance of
the pedagogical theme of the painting to its reflection on mimesis. With its
arsenal of repetition, exemplification, role modeling, and imitation, education
is a kind of practical mimetics- a fact that notoriously did not escape Plato, who
adumbrates his theory of mimesis out of the educational practices described
in the Republic . Yet the imitating student bears a very different relationship
to the teacher than the artistic copy does to its original, for both the student
and the teacher are clearly and unquestionably real. In The Girlhood of Mary
Virgin , Rossetti implicitly asks his viewers to treat the relation among artistic
styles and subjects in the painting as akin to that between teacher and student,
not the illusory copy and its material original. Conflating the scene of educa-
tion with the mise-en-scène of aesthetics, the painting suggests that art theories
and practices are learned conventions, not unquestionable realities, and that
artworks necessarily arise from and are viewed within concrete social situa-
tions.25 Rossetti presents mimesis as one traditional artistic practice among
others- theological symbolism, embroidery, art as second nature- and not
the inevitable condition of all representation. The scene of education depicts
artistic production as a choice among these practices.
Educational scenarios structure many of the other manifesto-like works
from the late 1840s and early 1850s. The most notable example is the short
story, "Hand and Soul," published in The Germ in 1850, which tells of a
fictional early Italian painter, Chiaro del'Erma, who comes to reject the imita-
tion of nature and traditional allegory under the supernatural tutelage of his
female "soul." Chiaro's artistic development begins with the repudiation of
his worldly master and ends with the teachings of his soul. Rossetti's draw-
ing A Parable of Love ( 1850) offers a lighter but no less significant take on the
relation between imitation and education.26 The drawing depicts a woman
painting her self-portrait under the tutelage of a male instructor, who holds
her brush to the canvas while looking at the woman's reflection in a mirror.
A Parable of Love is one of a striking number of paintings and drawings in
Rossetti's corpus, generally informal or unfinished, that depict artists at work.
The most famous of these are the watercolor Giotto Painting the Portrait of Dante
(1859) and the oil painting The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice (1853),
which was based on a sketch from 1849 called Dante Drawing an AngeL All of
these images stress the making of art rather than its completion, the necessary
acts of seeing and rendering that produce the finished representation. In A
Parable o/Love, Rossetti almost parodically underscores the twining of artistic
and pedagogical imitation: the mirror is at once a reflection and an artistic
tool; the self-portrait a mimetic artwork and pedagogical exercise; and the
man uses the image in the mirror to help guide the woman's imitation of his
movements. As in The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, Rossetti multiplies versions
of mimesis in this drawing in order to foreground the material processes of
representation, as well as the social contexts in which it occurs (the artist is
clearly using his teaching as a tool of seduction- a fact suggested by the two
servants knowingly observing the scene in the background).
The explicitly pedagogical sonnet "St. Luke the Painter" similarly associ-
ates artistic mimesis with learned practices of looking and the imitation of
a role model. Written in 1848, and later revised and paired with two related
poems in The House of Life (1870; 1881), under the collective title "Old and
New Art," this poem recounts the history of painting as a story of a teacher's
lessons lost and potentially re-found:
Give honour unto Luke Evangelist;

For it is he (the aged legends say)
Who first taught art to fold her hands and pray.
Scarcely at once she dared to rend the mist
Of devious symbols: but soon having wist
How sky-breadth and field-silence and this day
Are symbols also in some deeper way,
She looked through these to God and was God's priest
And if, past noon, her toil began to irk,

And she sought talismans, and turned in vain
To soulless self-reflections of man's skill,-
Yet now, in this the twilight, she might still
Kneel in the latter grass to pray again,
Ere the night cometh and she may not work. (Sonnet LXXIV, p. 160)
The sonnet narrates the history of art not as a sequence of changing styles or
technical innovations, but as a shift in how artists regard the natural world.
Following the dictates of Luke, the patron saint of painters, early artists were
driven by devotional fidelity to find the divine in nature. They represent
nature not for itself, but to honor its creator. Rossetti contrasts this ideal
with traditional theories of mimesis in two ways. St. Luke's students initially
consider their artistic practice as a kind of unveiling and try to "rend the mist"
of worldly images, revealing them as mere copies- "devious symbols"- of the
divine original. They soon learn that divinity resides in nature itself, not in
the reality it imitates. Rossetti underscores this point by selecting examples
of natural objects that border on the ineffable: "sky-breadth" and "field-
silence" are not open to mimetic reproduction. Then, becoming bored with
this devotional labor, the artists in Rossetti's sonnet turn to another form of
mimesis: the vanity (in both senses) of self-reflection and technical perfection
of reproduction. The hope for a renewed artistic practice that Rossetti holds
out in the sestet tellingly coincides with the end of the day, that is, with the
loss of light and thus the ability of the artists to see their objects or themselves.
Darkness makes a strictly mimetic art impossible and will presumably encour-
age the artists to turn again to the spiritual for their inspiration.27
Rossetti's play on the relation between mimesis and education in these
works has the potentially subversive effect of erasing any clear distinction
between artist and audience. The artists in A Parable of Love and "St. Luke
the Painter" are at once creators and spectators, and the practices of looking
that underlie their artistic production also evoke the relationship between the
artwork and its audience. Many of Rossetti's works from the 1860s and 1870s
make this relationship central to their theme and composition. Prettejohn
has persuasively argued that Rossetti's late paintings of "stunners" "call into
question the traditional ways in which viewers respond to pictures." The
paintings, she notes, break down the conventional illusion that pictorial space
corresponds to real space and aggressively engage the viewer both visually and
erotically ("Beauriful Women," p. 72). Although they often depict women
looking out of windows, Rossetti's paintings of this period are composition-
ally and thematically akin to mirrors. Many of Rossetti's mature poetic works
set up a similarly disconcerting relationship with their readers. Rossetti's first
volume of collected works, the Poems of 1870, was made up mostly of texts
originally written between 1847 and 1853. One of the few new poems included
in this book was a short work entitled "Aspecta Medusa" (The Medusa Be-
held). Probably written in 1865, this poem presents a searching reflection on
mimesis that follows from and extends the insights of The Girlhood of Mary
Virgin,28 But whereas the painting approaches mimesis through the question
of artistic practice,29 "Aspecta Medusa" does so through the reading practices
it at once solicits and forbids:
Andromeda, by Perseus saved and wed,

Hankered each day to see the Gorgon's head:
Till o'er a fount he held it, bade her lean,
And mirrored in the wave was safely seen
That death she lived by.
Let not thine eyes know

Any forbidden thing itself, although
It once should save as well as kill: but be
Its shadow upon life enough for thee. (11. 1-8)
Perhaps because of its apparent simplicity, this poem has been the subject of
relatively little critical discussion, but it is extraordinarily rich in allusion and
implications. It is built upon a complicated series of intertextual references to
the foundational metaphors that inform the mimetic model of art. Whereas
The Girlhood of Mary Virgin multiplies the originals it ostensibly copies, all of
the references in this poem lead back to a single "original": the head of the
Medusa. This original is, strictly speaking, impossible, for the reader who
seeks it out is legendarily doomed; the knowledge Perseus would present to
Andromeda is "not to be seen of men." Although it seems at first glance to
be a poem about the danger of forbidden knowledge, "Aspecta Medusa" is
in fact a poem about the necessity of representation.30 Andromeda does not
renounce her desire to see the Medusa's head, but accepts limitations on how
she can see it. Understood in this way, the poem offers a lesson about the
responsibilities of the artistic spectator. The best reader, for Rossetti, is one
who respects the autonomy of the copy and does not regard it as the mere
shadow of an ontologically superior original.
Like many of the theoretical works from the 1840s, "Aspecta Medusa"
presents an educational scenario. Structurally, the text is based on the classic
didactic model of the parable or exemplum. The story of Perseus and An-
dromeda in the poem's first stanza serves to illustrate the lesson enunciated
in its second stanza. This lesson takes the form of an aphorism ("Let not thine
eyes know / Any forbidden thing itself"), which purports to offer a general
truth. The myth of Perseus and Andromeda, moreover, while not explicitly
an educational narrative, alludes in Rossetti's telling to several recognizable
educational topoi. Classical and early-modern mythographers often inter-
preted Perseus- who frees Andromeda from her chains, and is aided in his
battle against the Gorgon by Athena, the goddess of reason and wisdom- as
a figure for the power of education.31 The Medusa's head is in this respect an
emblem for the educator's control over the irrational and incomprehensible.
In Rossetti's poem, Perseus is the teacher and holds the knowledge that his
student Andromeda desires. He governs her access to it and is responsible
for finding an adequate means of framing this knowledge for her. A sketch
Rossetti began for the uncompleted painting that was to accompany this poem
depicts this relation to knowledge in the placement of the figures. Perseus
literally stands between Andromeda and the Medusa's head, and puts his
guiding hand on his student's arm.
If "Aspecta Medusa" has the generic, thematic, and structural character-
istics of a didactic poem, however, these formal qualities constitute something

of a ruse. Indeed, it is by no means entirely clear what lesson the poem seeks
to teach. The most obvious analogy is to the many Western stories and fairy
tales about the dangers of excessive curiosity, in particular excessive female
curiosity. But while Andromeda is curious, and thus risks becoming a bad
example, she is satisfied with looking at the Medusa's head in the water and
resists the temptation to look at it directly. Moreover, unlike most stories
about curiosity, "Aspecta Medusa" does not tell us entirely to eschew forbid-
den knowledge; rather, it warns us not to seek knowledge of any "forbidden
thing itself." Presumably, representations of such things are fine. The poem
is rich with allusions to theological structures of representation. The phrase
"that death she lived by" refers to the death of the Medusa, whose severed
head allows Perseus to rescue Andromeda, but it also alludes in the context of
Christian theology to Christ as a sacrificial stand-in for the human race. The
word "shadow" would similarly have pointed Rossetti's Victorian readers to
the language of biblical typology, in which the type is akin to a shadow cast
by its future fulfillment. Typology is especially pertinent to interpretations of
Perseus, who has been read since late antiquity as a type of Christ.32
Another detail in the poem pertains even more directly to the practice
of artistic representation: the head of the Medusa itself. We now tend to fol-
low Freud in treating the Medusa as a figure for the threat of castration, but
there is a long mythographical tradition that associates her effect with the
power of representation. The Gorgon was among the most common figures
depicted in Greek decorative art, and early literary versions of the myth allude
unmistakably to the Medusa's powerful "aesthetic" impact.33 Many versions
of the myth associate the Medusa with the Muses. Hesiod, Apollodorus, and
Ovid all note that the winged horse Pegasus sprang from the neck of Medusa
when Perseus killed her. After his emergence, Pegasus creates the Hippocrene
spring on Mount Helicon, home of the Muses, with a blow from his hoof.
Ovid explicitly compares the Medusa to an artist, describing her lair as a
kind of studio populated by the "forms [simulacra] of men and beasts changed
into stone" by her glance.34 After he has killed the Medusa, Perseus himself
becomes an artist, using the power of the Gorgon's head to turn his enemies
into what Ovid pointedly calls marble statues ( signum de mármore ). Later writ-
ers, from Petrarch to Shelley, follow Ovid in treating the Medusa as a figure
for the uncanny power of beauty.35
The most important allusion to the theory of mimesis in the poem
is, of course, the water mirror Perseus uses to present the Medusa's head to
Andromeda. This fount recalls Socrates' famous analogy of painting with a
mirror from book ten of the Republic . But the reflection in "Aspecta Medusa"
is only apparently a copy. The concluding lesson of the poem, "but be / Its
shadow upon life enough for thee," goes conspicuously against the grain of
180/ VICTORIAN POETRY
Plato's contrast between mere images and purely rational truth. Yet the water
mirror here does more than simply reverse Plato, valorizing the image over the
real. The head of the Medusa is not just any "original"; it cannot be known
in any other way than as a reflection. From the perspective of human knowl-
edge, there simply is no "real" Medusa's head apart from the mirror image.
In fact, the shadow is far preferable to the truth and serves as its unavoidable
placeholder. Like Andromeda, we can only choose the shadow if we wish to
survive.36 This choice constrains student and teacher, spectator and artist,
alike. Perseus behaves something like a didactic poet, holding a truth he has
conquered and presenting it to his "student" in a safe form. Neither Perseus
nor Andromeda can turn around without danger, however. Rossetti's sketch
for the unfinished painting of the scene is again telling in this regard: the
image "mirrored in the wave" would not depict the Medusa alone but would
superimpose the image of teacher, student, and "lesson" on the same plane.
In the mirror of the work, there is no meaningful difference between artist
and spectator; both are "placed" within the same frame as the image.
This dissymmetry between the image and the original that the Medusa's
head introduces into the poem is also evident in the poem's relation to its
mythological original. Unlike, for example, the story of Odysseus, which comes
to us in the canonical form of Homer's epic, the myth of Perseus has no single
origin, existing in numerous, fragmentary, and often contradictory versions.
The scene that Rossetti's poem describes, moreover, does not appear in any of
the canonical literary accounts of the myth. In a letter from November 1867
to his patron C. P. Matthews, who had commissioned the painting that was
to have accompanied the poem, Rossetti writes that, while he has discerned
"slight representations" of the scene on vases and wall decorations, "the subject
does not exist in any completely rendered form that I know of."37 Just as the
Medusa can only be seen by means of representation, so the specific scene the
poem depicts is available to us only by means of the poem's words. There is
no single, unified original to which it stands as a copy, no unequivocal prior
truth it can be said to imitate. Rossetti conceived of the scene of the poem,
very much as he conceived of the scene of The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, as its
own original. It only "reflects" the myth metaleptically, by asserting an ancient
lineage where no such lineage can definitively be said to exist.
The skewed relation between copy and original extends to the poem's
didactic moral. Didactic works are consistent with the Platonic model of mi-
mesis in one key respect: they treat the work itself as a mere image of a true
original, namely the discursive lesson the image is entrusted to deliver. The
images in a didactic text are, like images in Platonic theory, the inessential
reflection of the truth. The scene and the didactic lesson of "Aspecta Medusa"
are closely modeled on an important didactic moment from Dante's Divine
Comedy- a moment that turns explicitly upon just this problem. In canto nine
of the Inferno , Virgil and Dante encounter the three Furies at the gates of Dis.
When they see the mortal Dante, the Furies call on Medusa to punish him
for the harm that Theseus had done to them in his abduction of Persephone.
In order to ward off this punishment, Virgil instructs Dante to turn around
and cover his eyes, and then, to ensure his protection, places his own hands
over the pilgrim's hands and physically turns him away from the dangerous
sight. Dante then addresses his reader about the relation between image and
idea, in words that Rossetti clearly had in mind in writing the second stanza
of his poem:
O voi ch'avete li Stelletti sani,

mirate la dottrina che s'asconde
sotto '1 velame de li versi strani.
O you that have a sane intelligence

Look ye unto the doctrine which herein
Conceals itself 'neath the strange verses' veil.38
As John Freccero argues, this warning uses the classical image of the Medusa
to figure the interpretive petrifaction that Saint Paul claims will afflict those
who remain bound to the letter of the old covenant. The literal petrifaction
that would befall the pilgrim if he looked at the Medusa is akin to the figura-
tive petrifaction- the hardening of the heart and mind, in Paul's terms- that
will befall those who look only at the letter of Dante's allegory and ignore its
spiritual meanings.39 The Medusa represents the threat that one might attend
only to the letter or the image and ignore the spiritual lesson with which it is
endowed. Dante warns that truth lies beyond the shadow, is hidden behind the
allegorical veil of verses that constitute the poem. Virgil's protective gestures
are, in this regard, a figure for the didactic function of poetry, the truth that
should effectively blind the reader, as it were, to the mere images that convey
it. With his eyes covered, Dante is not affected by the dangerous sight and can
continue with his journey. In just the same way, a poem that subordinates its
poetic qualities to its didactic lesson will allow the reader to learn and move on
without getting caught up in and petrified by the seductive surface of images.
While Rossetti faithfully imitates Dante's scenario and structure of ad-
dress, his substitution of Perseus for Virgil and Andromeda for Dante has some
surprising consequences. Virgil covers Dante's eyes and turns him around;
Perseus uses a reflection and instructs his student to look at it. This substitu-
tion inverts Virgil's gesture, putting an act of seeing in place of a figurative
blinding. Like the veil of verses in Dante, the mirror of Medusa in Rossetti
mediates between the initiate and the knowledge that is revealed to him or
her. For Dante, however, the Medusa figures the literary image, the example
apart from the truth it illustrates. For Rossetti, she figures the precept, the
knowledge that is at once hidden and revealed by the image in the mirror.
Rossetti thus disables Dante's allegorical pedagogy. Turning from the letter
to the spirit- from the water mirror to the actual head- means looking at the
Medusa, not lifting the veil of verses. It presages petrifaction not revelation.
Instead of telling his readers not to be seduced by images, Rossetti demon-
strates that they can grasp nothing but images. And rather than blinding them
to the letter, Rossetti in effect blinds them to the spirit, dares them to read for
the moral "original." The poem becomes autonomous by default, for there is
no conceivable discursive original for the literary copy- and it is manifestly a
copy- that readers encounter. In place of the Platonic mirror of nature, which
figures the work as a dependent reflection of independent truths, Rossetti
here holds up a mirror for his readers. "Aspecta Medusa" instructs by refus-
ing to instruct, teaches by denying its reader the conventional satisfaction of
a moral lesson or a recognizable image of the world.
Both The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and "Aspecta Medusa" bear out
Jonathan Freedman's astute claim that aestheticist works "persistently creates
conundrums or puzzles that are designed to elicit acts of interpretation but
not to provide any resolution for them." Aestheticist writing in this way shifts
"the burden of divination and imaginative understanding from the poet to
the reader."40 Both the painting and the poem imitate mimesis, borrowing
the traditional language and imagery of Platonic theory to question that
theory and its influence. In so doing, Rossetti reminds his audience that art
is irreducibly material and real, not the insubstantial shadow of the truth that
Platonic tradition imagines.41 Rossetti does not simply dispense with mimesis,
but turns a mirror on the received beliefs and practices of his audience and of
contemporary artists and critics. Rossetti's theoretical works accord with the
major claim about art that would become central to British aestheticism at
the end of the century. In his infamous "Ten O'clock" lecture (1885), James
McNeill Whistler argues for the autonomy of art from both mimesis and
moral lessons by criticizing the viewing practices of contemporary audiences:
"Hence it is that nobility of action, in this life, is hopelessly linked with the
merit of the work that portrays it; and thus the people have acquired the habit
of looking, as who should say, not at a picture, but through it, at some human
fact, that shall, or shall not, from a social point of view, better their mental
or moral state."42 For Whistler, as for Rossetti, the most significant relation
between art and social life comes not from the moral lessons a work conveys
or the truths it reveals, but from the habits of looking that viewers bring to
their experience of the material work of art. There is nothing inevitable about
the habit of looking through rather than at a painting; it is a learned behavior,
a social convention that has attained the status of common sense- and it is
therefore a behavior subject to change.
Notes
My thanks to Liz Prettejohn and Colin Cruise for their invaluable comments on an
earlier version of this essay.
1 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Collected Poetry and Prose , ed. Jerome McGann (Harvard Univ.
Press, 2003), p. 317. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Rossetti's poetry and
prose are from this edition.
2 Walter Pater, Appreciations (London: Macmillan, 1910), p. 218.
3 Jerome McGann, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game that Must Be Lost (New Haven:
Yale Univ. Press, 2000), p. 7.
4 Plato, The Republic , trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968), pp. 284; 601c.
5 J. Hillis Miller, "The Mirror's Secret: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Double Work of Art,"
Victorian Poetry 29 (1991): 333. On mirrors and reflections in Rossetti, see also David
Riede, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Limits of Victorian Vision (Ithaca: Cornell Univ.
Press, 1983), pp. 128-148; J. B. Bullen, The Pre-Raphaelite Body: Fear and Desire in Paint-
ing, Poetry , and Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), pp. 123-148; and Donald Stuart,
"Bitter Tears: Narcissus in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Lyrics," Victorians Institute Journal
2(1973): 2740.
6 Elizabeth K. Heisinger, Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and
William Morris (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2008), pp. 144-174.
7 Elizabeth Prettejohn, "'Beautiful Women with Floral Adjuncts': Rossetti's New Style,"
in Julian Treuherz, Elizabeth Prettejohn, and Edwin Becker, Dante Gabriel Rossetti
(London: Thames and Hudson, 2003), p. 90. See also Prettejohn, "Rossetti and the
Fleshly School," in ArtforArťs Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (New Haven: Yale
Univ. Press, 2007); and Linda M. Shires' discussion of the double works in Perspectives:
Modes of Viewing and Knowing in Nineteenth-Century England (Columbus: Ohio State
Univ. Press, 2009), pp. 36-61.
8 See David Wayne Thomas, Cultivating Victorians : Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic
(Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp. 125-155. See also Andrea Hen-
derson, "The 'Gold Bar of Heaven': Framing Objectivity in D. G. Rossetti's Poetry
and Painting," ELH 76 (2009): 911-929.
9 For the iconography of this painting, I draw chiefly on Susan Beegel, "Rossetti's Son-
nets and Paintings on Mary's Girlhood: A Case Study in Reciprocal Illustration,"
Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 2 (1982): 1-6; D. M. R. Bentley, "Rossetti's 'Ave' and
Related Pictures," VP 15 (1977): 21-35; Laura L. Doan, "Narrativity and Transforma-
tive Iconography in D. G. Rossetti's Earliest Paintings," Soundings 71 (1988): 471-483;
David Todd Heffner, "Additional Typological Symbolism in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's
The Girlhood of Mary Virgin," Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 5 (1985): 68-80; Wolfgang
Lottes, "'Take out the Picture and Frame the Sonnet': Rossetti's Sonnets and Verses
for his own Works of Art," Anglia 96 (1978): 108-135; Kathryn Ready, "Reading Mary
as Reader: The Marian Art of Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti," VP 46 (2008):
151-174; Virginia Surtees, The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Cata-
logue Raisonné , 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); and James M. Swafford, "'The
Fulness of Time': The Early Marian Poems of D. G. Rossetti," Journal of Pre-Raphaelite
Studies 2 (1982): 78-91. On the relation between the painting and the two sonnets
Rossetti composed about it, see Brian Donnelly, "Sonnet-Image-Intertext: Reading
Rossetti's The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and Found ," VP 48 (2010): 475-488.
10 Doan suggests that this detail points to Mary's role as "God's instrument" ("Narrativ-
ity," p. 476).
11 Martin Meisel, "'Half Sick of Shadows': The Aesthetic Dialogue in Pre-Raphaelite
Painting," in Nature and the Victorian Imagination , ed. U. C. Knoepflmacher and G.
B. Tennyson (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1977), p. 315.
12 The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti , ed. William E. Fredeman, 9 vols. (Cam-
bridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002-09), 1:75-76. Rossetti writes that he was forced to put off
other projects so that he could paint certain "natural objects" (presumably the lily)
from life before winter.
13 The classic studies of Victorian typology are George P. Landow, Victorian Types , Victorian
Shadows : Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature , Art, and Thought (Boston: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1980), and Herbert L. Sussman, Fact into Figure: Typology in Carlyle,
Ruskin, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1979).
14 Sussman, p. 62. For a discussion of Rossetti's reasons for excluding Justice, see Hef-
fner, "Additional Typological Symbolism."
15 "The Protoevangelium of James," ed. Oscar Cullmann, in New Testament Apocrypha ,
ed. Wilhelm Schneemelcher, trans. R. McL. Wilson, 2 vols. (Louisville: Westminster
John Knox, 2003), 1:430.
16 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend , trans. William Granger Ryan, 2 vols. (Princ-
eton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993), 2:153.
17 For a useful brief survey of this association in the context of British literature, see
Kathryn R. King, "Of Needles and Pens and Women's Work," Tulsa Studies in Women's
Literature 14 (1995): 77-93.
18 Compare Linda Peterson's claim that the change limits Mary to a "trivial pursuit"
and relegates her "to the private, domestic sphere" (Linda H. Peterson, "Restoring
the Book: The Typological Hermeneutics of Christina Rossetti and the PRB," VP 32
[1994]: 211). On the anti-feminist elements in this painting, see also Lynne Pearce,
Woman/Image/Text: Readings in Pre-Raphaelite Art and Literature (Toronto: Univ. of
Toronto Press, 1991), pp. 31-45. On the history of the image of Mary as a reader, see
Ready, "Reading Mary as Reader."
19 On the tendency of male writers in the nineteenth century to adopt femininity as
a form of subversion, see Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1995), pp. 91-114; and Barbara Spackman, Decadent Genealogies: The
Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D'Annunzio (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989).
On the centrality of the feminine for the Pre-Raphaelites, see Kathy Alexis Psomiades,
Beauty's Body : Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (Stanford: Stanford
Univ. Press, 1997).
20 Rossetti's painting Ecce Ancilla Domini! (1850; Tate Britain), a companion piece to The
Girlhood of Mary Virgin , depicts just this scene: while an eroticized Mary cowers in her
bed, the angel Gabriel (in person, and not as the traditional dove) approaches with
a distinctly phallic lily in his hands. Heisinger compares Mary to Leda ( Poetry and the
Pre-Raphaelite Arts , p. 41). For the story of Arachne, see Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans.
Frank Justus Miller, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984),
1:288-299.
21 Louis Réau, Iconographie de l'art chrétien, 3 vols. (Paris: PUF, 1957), 2, pt. 2: 168.
22 One might contrast Rossetti's Mary with Tennyson's "Lady of Shalott" ( 1832)- another
medieval(ized) woman engaged in textile work- who fatally rejects the "shadows" of
her artistic work for the real world outside her tower.
23 On this version of mimesis in Aristotle, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography:

Mimesis , Philosophy , Politics, trans. Christopher Fynsk (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press,
1989), pp. 255-56.
24 It is suggestive that two of Rossetti's subsequent paintings, both from 1854-55, depict
the Virgin as a gardener: the watercolor Mary Nazarene shows the Virgin tending a
lily in a garden; and another watercolor, The Passover in the Holy Family , depicts her
picking bitter herbs for the feast.
25 Many of the early responses to Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite movement figured its
challenge to the artistic establishment as a revolt of the students against their teachers.
In his widely read 1853 lecture "Pre-Raphaelitism," Ruskin traces the origins of the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood not to abstract artistic principles or to a nostalgic long-
ing for the past, but to the rough and tumble of schoolroom politics: "Pupils in the
same schools, receiving precisely the same instruction which for so long a time has
paralysed every one of our painters,- these boys agree in disliking to copy the antique
statues set before them. They copy as they are bid, and they copy them better than any
one else; they carry off prize after prize, and yet they hate their work. At last, they are
admitted to study from the life; they find the life very different from the antique, and
say so. Their teachers tell them the antique is the best, and they mustn't copy the life.
They agree among themselves that they like the life, and that copy it they will. They
do copy it faithfully, and their masters forthwith declare them to be lost men. Their
fellow students hiss them whenever they enter the room. They can't help it; they join
hands and tacitly resist both the hissing and the instruction" (John Ruskin, The Works
of John Ruskin , ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. [London: George
Allen, 1903-1912], 12:155-156).
26 For A Parable of Love (alternately titled L oves Mirror ), see http://www.preraphaelites.
org/ the-collection/ 1904P491/loves-mirror-or-a-parable-of-love/
27 There are a number of Renaissance pieces that show Saint Luke painting a portrait
of the Virgin Mary, and, like The Girlhood of Mary Virgin , they depict a historically
impossible encounter: Luke lived many years after the events he describes, but because
he gives the fullest account in the synoptic Gospels of Mary's life he is said to have
"painted" her portrait in words. For a useful discussion of Luke as a painter, see
Danièle Alexandre-Bidon, "La transfiguration de Saint Luc à travers l'iconographie
medievale" in Figures de l'écrivain au moyen âge, ed. Danielle Buschinger (Göppingen:
Kummerle Verlag, 1991), pp. 7-23.
28 Rossetti sent a copy of the poem, unchanged from the version printed in the 1870
volume, in a letter to his mother from July 20, 1867, though it seems to have been
written as early as 1865. It is worth noting that the owner of The Girlhood of Mary Virgin
had sent the painting back to Rossetti for some repairs at the end of 1864. Rossetti
did not return the painting to its owner until the summer of 1866, well after he had
written "Aspecta Medusa." We might speculate that the pedagogical thematic in the
poem was suggested by renewed acquaintance with the painting.
29 For the painting Aspecta Medusa, see http://www.preraphaelites.org/the-
collection/ 1904P348/ perseus-and-andromeda-aspecta-medusa/
30 Most of the critics who have written about the poem offer some variation of this inter-
pretation, arguing that "Aspecta Medusa" narrates the containment of Andromeda's
curiosity, especially her curiosity about sexuality. Bram Dijkstra, for example, suggests
that Rossetti's aim in the poem is to combat the "gorgonlike" aspect of female narcissism
( Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture [New York: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1986], pp. 137-138). Martin Danahay argues that the poem depicts Perseus
rescuing Andromeda "from the danger of her own sexuality" ("Mirrors of Masculine
Desire: Narcissus and Pygmalion in Victorian Representation," VP 32 (1994): 48).
David Riede suggests the poem "invokes the classical tradition to justify its 'strong
savour' of death, forbidden knowledge, and the fatal appeal of female sexuality" ( Dante
Gabriel Rossetti Revisited [New York: Twaine, 1992], pp. 91-92).
31 Early modern mythographers made much of this association, often interpreting the
myth as the victory of reason over the passions, educated over instinctual humanity. See
Sylvia Huot, "The Medusa Interpolation in the Romance of the Rose: Mythographic
Program and Ovidian Intertext," Speculum 62 (1987): 865-877.
32 On this mythographic tradition, see Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods , trans.
Barbara F. Sessions (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), p. 223. Victorian painters
and poets, including Rossetti, often elaborated upon this reading, drawing typological
associations between Perseus and Saint George (another common figure for Christ),
and between Andromeda and the Virgin Mary. See Adrienne Auslander Munich,
Andromeda's Chains : Gender and Interpretation in Victorian Literature and Art (New York:
Columbia Univ. Press, 1989).
33 On the symbolism and ritual functions of the Medusa's head in Greek culture, see
Camille Dumoulié, "Le poète et la Méduse," Nouvelle Revue Française 462 (1991): 199-
220; Edward Phinney, "Perseus' Battle with the Gorgons," Transactions and Procedings
of the American Philological Association 102 (1971): 445-463; Tobin Siebers, The Mirror of
Medusa (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1983), pp. 1-26; and Jean-Pierre Vernant,
M ortals and Immortals , ed. Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991), pp.
111-138. On Medusa as a figure for poetry in the Renaissance, see Miranda Johnson
Haddad, "Ovid's Medusa in Dante and Ariosto: The Poetics of Self-Confrontation,"
Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 19 (1989): 211-225.
34 Ovid, Metamorphoses y 1:233. Ovid also uses the word simulacum for Pygmalion's statue
and the image of Narcissus in the pool.
35 On the Medusa as a figure for beauty in the nineteenth century, see Jerome McGann,
"The Beauty of the Medusa: A Study in Romantic Literary Iconology," Studies in Ro-
manticism 11 (1972): 3-25; and Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 25-52. On Victorian Medusas see Elisabeth G.
Gitter, "The Power of Women's Hair in the Victorian Imagination," PMLA 99, no. 5
(1984): 936-954; and Kent Patterson, "A Terrible Beauty: Medusa in Three Victorian
Poets," Tennessee Studies in Literature 17 (1972): 111-120.
36 For more on this aspect of the Medusa, see Thomas Albrecht's perceptive reading of
"Aspecta Medusa" in The Medusa Effect: Representation and Epistemology in Victorian
Aesthetics (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009), pp. 1-14.
37 Correspondence , 3:590. Matthews objected to Rossetti's design, and eventually withdrew
the commission. The painting was never finished, but three sketches remain. While
the scene Rossetti describes does not occur in any familiar classical versions of the story
(and is not mentioned in Lemprière's Classical Dictionary , Rossetti's usual source for
mythological references), there are, as he notes, a few extant Pompeiian mosaics and
Greek vase paintings that resemble the scene depicted in Rossetti's unfinished painting,
as well as several imitations of these works from the eighteenth century. Rossetti likely
knew of the Pompeiian examples; in "Notes on Some Pictures of 1868," Swinburne,
MATTHEW POTOLSKY/ 187
who was still close to Rossetti at the time, mentions these scenes in his discussion of
the sketches for the painting, and writes- slyly alluding to the myth it depicts- that
the subject is "old and well-worn," though here "renewed and reinformed with life
by the vital genius of the artist" (Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Complete Works of
Algernon Charles Swinburne , ed. Edmund Gosse and Thomas Wise, 20 vols. [London:
Heinemann, 1925-271, 15:215). The important point of the letter is that Rossetti
conceived of his poem and design as adding to a still fragmentary myth rather than
reproducing some fully extant portion of it. On the sources for Rossetti's poem, see
Monica Grasso, "'Aspecta Medusa': notes sur la diffusion d'une iconographie entre
deux siècles," Retour au XVIIIe siècle , ed. Roland Mortier, et al. (Brussels, Belgium:
Editions de l'Université de Bruxelles, 1994), pp. 127-135; and Laurence Roussillon,
"Aspecta Medusa: The Many Faces of Medusa in the Painting and Poetry of Dante
Rossetti ," Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 11 (2002): 5-18.
38 Inferno , canto 9, 11. 61-63; the English translation is by William Michael Rossetti,
quoted in Maria Francesca Rossetti, A Shadow of Dante (London: Longmans, Green
and Company, 1914), p. 74. On the Rossetti family's interest in Dante, see Alison
Milbank, Dante and the Victorians (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1998), pp.
131-149.
39 John Freccero, "Medusa: The Letter and the Spirit," in Dante: The Poetics of Conversion,
ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), p. 123.
40 Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity
Culture (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 29, 35.
41 In this regard, I would dispute Marcus Bullock's claim that "the complex self-conscious-
ness that thematizes the work of composition itself within the writing is much rarer in
Rossetti than in Baudelaire" (Marcus Bullock, "Benjamin, Baudelaire, Rossetti, and
the Discovery of Error," Modern Language Quarterly 53 [1992]: 204). This may be true
on the level of theme, but not in terms of allusion and imagery, which, as McGann
demonstrates, were Rossetti's chief means of theoretical self-reflection.
42 James McNeil WTiistler, Whistler on Art, ed. Nigel Thorp (Washington, D. C.: Smith-
sonian Institution Press, 1994), p. 81.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Mimesis Potolsky

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Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Mimesis Potolsky

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The Substance of Shadows: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Mimesis

Author(s): MATTHEW POTOLSKY

"You knew that figure, when painted, had been seen;

trained by modernist and post-modernist experimentation, but they are no

Virgin weaves threads to create an image. Both gardening and embroidery in

Give honour unto Luke Evangelist;

And if, past noon, her toil began to irk,

Andromeda, by Perseus saved and wed,

Let not thine eyes know

istics of a didactic poem, however, these formal qualities constitute something

O voi ch'avete li Stelletti sani,

O you that have a sane intelligence

23 On this version of mimesis in Aristotle, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography:

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