The Work
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) was both a painter and a poet, and his biblical and spiritual work spans both media with extraordinary richness. As a poet, his most important work with biblical resonance is 'The Blessed Damozel' (first published in 1850 in The Germ, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood journal; substantially revised for the 1870 Poems) and the sonnet sequence The House of Life (published in full in Poems, 1870, and revised in Ballads and Sonnets, 1881). As a painter, his most important biblical works include Ecce Ancilla Domini (The Annunciation, 1850), Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee (begun 1858), and The Blessed Damozel (1875-1878).
'The Blessed Damozel' presents a young woman who has died and gone to heaven, leaning from 'the gold bar of Heaven' and looking down at her earthly lover. The poem combines the imagery of Revelation 21-22 (the heavenly Jerusalem, the River of Life, the Lamb) with the erotic longing of the Song of Songs to produce a vision of heaven that is simultaneously transcendent and intensely personal. It was the poem that introduced the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's aesthetic program to the British public and established Rossetti as the movement's most significant literary voice.
Biblical Engagement
Revelation 21:21 ('And the twelve gates were twelve pearls: every several gate was of one pearl: and the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass') provides the setting for 'The Blessed Damozel': heaven is the celestial city of Revelation 21-22, and the 'gold bar of Heaven' from which the damozel leans is a detail of architectural concreteness that combines the Revelation vision with the Pre-Raphaelite interest in precise material detail. The poem's heaven is not a vague spiritual realm but a place with specific features - seven stars, white rose-bloom, clear fountains, singing angels - drawn from Revelation's imagery but rendered with painterly precision.
Song of Songs 3:1-4 ('By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth') provides the erotic register within which the damozel's longing is expressed. The damozel yearns for her earthly lover as the beloved in the Song of Songs yearns for her absent lover: 'I wish that he were come to me, / For he will come,' she said. 'Have I not pray'd in Heaven? on earth, / Lord, Lord, has he not pray'd?' This combination of heavenly vision with sexual and romantic longing was characteristic of Rossetti's Pre-Raphaelite approach: the spiritual and the erotic were not opposed but were different registers of the same fundamental longing for union.
John 14:2 ('In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you') is the promise that the damozel trusts: heaven is a place of reunion, not of separation, and the separation she experiences is temporary. The poem's emotional structure depends on the tension between this promise and the present reality of separation: the damozel looks down from heaven not in triumphant bliss but in longing, because the Johannine promise of reunion has not yet been fulfilled.
The House of Life sonnets engage the Johannine and Pauline mysticism of love with characteristic intensity. Sonnet 1 ('Love Enthroned') describes Love as a divine figure attended by 'Birth, and Love, and Knowledge' - a Johannine combination of creation, love, and logos. Sonnet 77 ('Soul's Beauty') and Sonnet 78 ('Body's Beauty') present the soul and body as twin aspects of a beauty that participates in the divine - an aesthetic theology indebted to Neoplatonism but shaped by the Johannine conviction that the Word became flesh (John 1:14) and that the body is therefore a site of spiritual significance.
Author and Context
Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti was born on May 12, 1828, in London, the second child of an Italian political exile who had come to England in 1824. His father, Gabriele Rossetti, was a Dante scholar; his mother was an English woman of Italian descent; his sister was Christina Rossetti, whose devotional poetry is among the greatest in the English language. The family was steeped in Italian literature, Catholic cultural tradition, and Dante scholarship, and Rossetti's own name was chosen in honor of the great medieval poet.
Rossetti was a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, formed in 1848 with William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and others. The PRB's manifesto was a return to the seriousness and sincerity of pre-Renaissance Italian and Flemish art: the use of bright colors, precise natural detail, and sacred subject matter rendered with direct emotional engagement rather than academic convention. The group was not conventionally Christian - Rossetti himself was not a believing Christian in any orthodox sense - but they were deeply engaged with the visual and literary heritage of Christian devotion and used biblical subjects as vehicles for exploring the full range of human emotional and spiritual experience.
Rossetti's most painful biographical experience was the death in 1862 of his wife Elizabeth Siddal, a poet and artist who had been his model and muse for a decade before their marriage in 1860. Siddal died of a laudanum overdose that may have been accidental or suicidal. Rossetti buried the manuscript of his poems with her; he later had the coffin exhumed and the poems recovered (1869), an act of ghoulish desperation that haunted him. The grief, guilt, and erotic longing that pervade The House of Life are inseparable from this experience.
Pre-Raphaelite Biblical Aesthetics
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's engagement with biblical subjects was part of a broader Victorian religious crisis and religious revival. The Oxford Movement (from 1833) had renewed interest in Catholic and patristic Christianity within the Church of England; Evangelical revivalism had intensified the emotional engagement with biblical narrative; the growth of biblical criticism had simultaneously destabilized traditional beliefs. The PRB navigated this landscape by investing biblical subjects with intense psychological realism and erotic energy, treating the figures of the Annunciation, the Passion, and the Song of Songs not as remote icons but as deeply human participants in a drama of love and sacrifice.
Rossetti's Ecce Ancilla Domini (1850) presents the Annunciation not as a serene theological transaction but as a psychologically complex encounter: Mary is shown in bed, cornered against a wall, clearly frightened, while a pale and formal angel holds out a lily. The painting captures Luke 1:29-30 ('she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be') with unsettling accuracy. Its refusal of conventional Annunciation iconography made it controversial at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1850.
Reception History
Rossetti's work was initially controversial - the PRB's mixing of sacred subject matter with sensuous detail was attacked as 'Mariolatry' and worse by critics including Charles Dickens - but it gradually became the dominant aesthetic of Victorian religious art and poetry. John Ruskin's championship of the PRB in 1851 established their reputation, and by the 1860s their influence on English visual culture was pervasive.
Rossetti's specifically literary work has had a more complex reception. 'The Blessed Damozel' was immediately recognized as a masterpiece of its kind and has been anthologized continuously since 1850. The House of Life sonnets were attacked at publication by the critic Robert Buchanan ('The Fleshly School of Poetry,' 1871) for their explicit erotic content; Rossetti's response ('The Stealthy School of Criticism,' 1872) was a classic defense of the integration of spiritual and erotic experience in poetry.
Theological Significance
Rossetti's significance for the history of biblical reception lies in his demonstration that the sacred imagery of the Bible could be engaged with full erotic and psychological seriousness without either sentimentalizing it or desecrating it. His integration of Song of Songs eroticism with Revelation eschatology in 'The Blessed Damozel,' and his exploration of the theological dimensions of sexual love in The House of Life, anticipate the more explicit theology of eros developed by twentieth-century thinkers from C.S. Lewis to Pope John Paul II.
Legacy
Rossetti's visual influence on subsequent religious art has been enormous: the Pre-Raphaelite style shaped Victorian and Edwardian church decoration, stained glass, and book illustration worldwide. His literary influence has been more selective but significant: Yeats, whose early aestheticism was deeply indebted to Rossetti, developed the symbolist integration of spiritual and erotic imagery in directions that Rossetti anticipated.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should work with Revelation 21:1-4, 21:21-22:5 (the heavenly Jerusalem), Song of Songs 3:1-4, 8:6-7 (erotic longing and the power of love), John 14:1-6 (the Father's house), Luke 1:26-38 (the Annunciation), and John 20:11-18 (Mary Magdalene and the risen Christ - the encounter that Rossetti painted repeatedly).
Further Reading
- Jan Marsh, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter and Poet (1999) - the best modern biography, covering both the visual and literary work. - Jerome McGann, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game that Must Be Lost (2000) - the most sophisticated critical study of Rossetti's poetics. - Tim Barringer, Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (1999) - an essential guide to the PRB's visual and literary program in its religious and cultural context.