On Form: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Double Works of Art

This interdisciplinary thesis examines the double works of art of the major Victorian artist and writer Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82).

The intermedial form amalgamates picture and word—typically an oil painting and a sonnet, with the latter often inscribed on the picture frame of the former—to create a visual-verbal composite. Deploying close reading and a combined art historical and literary methodology, I explore the ways in which the pictorial and textual elements elaborate on a shared subject, illuminate one another, and facilitate a unified aesthetic experience for the viewer-reader.

Using case studies, I demonstrate that Rossetti’s picture-poem composites are engaged in a prismatic and sustained dialogue, where each medium enriches and challenges the other, as the elucidatory affluences of one art form are brought to bear on the other in service of their joint imaginative venture. As part of this aesthetic criticism, I also explicate the double works’ formal plasticity and trace how the form manifests as both a tangible imagetext object and an intangible metaphysical ideal.

My first chapter positions the double work form in its theoretical landscape, illuminating the concepts that underpin the painting-poetry relationship. My second chapter considers Sibylla Palmifera (1866–70) in dialogue with absence, presence, and ideal beauty. My third chapter addresses Lady Lilith (1866–68, altered 1872–73) and the aesthetics of failure. My fourth chapter pursues unity and division in The Blessed Damozel (1871–78). My fifth chapter explores picture-word entanglement in Proserpine (1871–82). My final chapter reads The House of Life: A Sonnet-Sequence (1881) as a sustained consideration of the reconfiguration and re-encounter of form.

This project contributes to the fields of Victorian poetry, British art history, nineteenth-century literary and visual culture, and aesthetics.