The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, exhibited in 1849, was Rossetti's first major exhibited painting and the first work publicly shown under the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's initials 'PRB.' It established the movement's program: intense color, flat perspective, typological symbolism, and a devotional seriousness about biblical subjects that deliberately rejected the polished vacancy of the Royal Academy's conventional religious painting. The subject - the domestic childhood of Mary before the Annunciation - had no New Testament basis but drew on the apocryphal tradition preserved in the Protoevangelium of James and in medieval devotional literature.
The Biblical and Apocryphal Source
The New Testament says almost nothing about Mary's childhood; Luke 1:26-27 introduces her as a virgin 'pledged to be married to a man named Joseph.' The tradition of Mary's girlhood education - her parents Joachim and Anne, her childhood in the Temple, her learning to read and to embroider - comes from the Protoevangelium of James (c. 150 AD) and from later medieval elaboration. Rossetti's programme connects this apocryphal tradition to the canonical text through symbolic layers: the vine Joachim trains on the trellis outside the window is a Johannine reference (John 15:1-5, 'I am the true vine'), understood as a prefiguration of Christ grown from Mary's body; the embroidery pattern Mary is working on foreshadows the cross she will stand beneath at John 19:25; the lily in the pot symbolizes the purity that Luke 1:28 implies in Gabriel's address 'full of grace.'
The Pre-Raphaelite Programme
Rossetti was twenty years old when he exhibited this painting. He had founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt only the previous year, and the movement's name announced its manifesto: to recover the intensity and sincerity of Italian painting before Raphael - before, that is, the polished academic conventions that the Brotherhood believed had replaced genuine feeling with technical virtuosity. The Girlhood's deliberate archaism - the flat space, the hard-edged drawing, the jewel-bright colors - was an aesthetic act of religious archaeology. Rossetti wanted the painting to feel like it had been made by a medieval artist who actually believed what he was painting.
Iconographic Programme
The painting is extraordinarily dense with symbol. The books Mary studies are labeled 'Temperance,' 'Fortitude,' 'Justice,' and 'Charity' - the cardinal virtues. The angel Gabriel stands behind Anne's chair, a witnessing presence. The white lily in the foreground is accompanied by a rose (both Marian symbols). The green palm in the corner refers to the martyr's palm and to Mary's eventual death. A red cloth with a thorn-stitched cross pattern has been interpreted as a reference to the Passion she will share through watching her son's death. Two sonnets Rossetti composed for the exhibition label explain the symbolic programme in verse - the first time in Pre-Raphaelite practice that a poem was published as part of the same artistic work as its paired painting.
Significance in Art History
The Girlhood of Mary Virgin established several patterns that would define Pre-Raphaelite painting: the use of a literary or scriptural text as the explicit interpretive key to the visual image; the rendering of female figures with simultaneously medieval idealization and Victorian psychological particularity; the insistence on symbolic density over narrative clarity; and the attachment of poetry to painting as a unified artistic statement. Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel's sister and a significant poet in her own right, modeled for the figure of Mary - which adds a layer of biographical typology characteristic of the entire Pre-Raphaelite enterprise.
The Pre-Raphaelite Project and Victorian Religion
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood emerged at a specific historical moment in British religious culture - the period of the Oxford Movement (Tractarianism), John Henry Newman's conversion to Rome (1845), and the popular religious revival that generated both Evangelical Protestantism and Anglo-Catholic aestheticism within the Church of England. The Brotherhood's members held diverse religious positions (Hunt was a committed Evangelical; Rossetti was a cultural Anglo-Catholic; Millais was relatively indifferent to formal religion) but shared a conviction that the artistic recovery of medieval and early Renaissance devotional sincerity was both an aesthetic and a spiritual program. The Girlhood of Mary Virgin belongs to this moment: it is an attempt to recover the visual piety of Fra Angelico and Ghirlandaio not as archaeological pastiche but as genuine devotional art for a Victorian audience that had largely lost the tradition. Whether Rossetti personally believed what he painted is less important than the fact that he believed painting it was the most honest artistic response to his cultural inheritance.
Visiting
The Girlhood of Mary Virgin is in the permanent collection of Tate Britain, London, where it is generally displayed in the Pre-Raphaelite galleries alongside Ecce Ancilla Domini and works by Millais, Hunt, and other Brotherhood members. The Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery holds the largest Pre-Raphaelite collection outside the Tate; between these two institutions virtually the complete major output of the movement can be studied.