The Brooklyn Rail

In the autumn of 1849, the young poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti visited Paris for the first time, on a continental excursion with his fellow Pre-Raphaelite, William Holman Hunt. The trip had been funded by the recent sale of his painting, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848–49), to the Marchioness of Bath for eighty pounds. In an excited letter to his brother William, he catalogued the treasures he saw as he “ran hurriedly through the Louvre”—paintings by Leonardo da Vinci and Titian, Jan van Eyck, and Fra Angelico. Among the “ineffably poetical Mantegnas” that caught Rossetti’s eye was Mars et Vénus, dit le Parnasse.

Painted in the late fifteenth century for the private study of Isabella d’Este, the young marchesa of Mantua, Mantegna’s “Parnassus” shows the Nine Muses dancing in a clearing to the music of Apollo. On the right, Mercury and Pegasus stroll together, while Mars and Venus embrace on a rocky arch above them all. Tucked away in his smithy, Vulcan points accusingly at the adulterous couple, while Cupid aims a blowgun at his genitals. A delicate landscape, dotted with buildings, recedes into the blue-green distance.

Rossetti responded to this painting with a sonnet, “For an Allegorical Dance of Women,” one of several “Sonnets for Pictures” he wrote on his tour. Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites aimed to find the future of art and poetry in the past—whether classical, medieval, or early modern—an aesthetic program that made translation, pastiche, and ekphrasis its defining procedures. Like John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Rossetti’s sonnets on the paintings of Mantegna, da Vinci, Giorgione, Ingres, and others are acutely aware of themselves as modern poems—the more poignantly so for their pursuit of antiquity.

“For an Allegorical Dance of Women” dramatizes the operations of the modern aesthetic imagination on the cultural past it inherits. In Rossetti’s representation of Mantegna’s painting, the mythological apparatus of the visual allegory vanishes. Mars, Venus, and the rest are missing from view. Only the dancers remain—not muses now, but “women”—posed before rocks and a distant sea. The title, too, deliberately obscures Mantegna’s subject, and by declaring the dance “allegorical” in the absence of any legible coordinates for interpretation, the poem redirects our attention to the feeling of significance:

Scarcely, I think; yet it indeed may be
The meaning reached him, when this music rang
Clear through his frame, a sweet possessive pang,
And he beheld these rocks and that ridged sea.
But I believe that, leaning tow’rds them, he
Just felt their hair carried across his face
As each girl passed him; nor gave ear to trace
How many feet; nor bent assuredly
His eyes from the blind fixedness of thought
To know the dancers.
(1–10)¹

Meaning has (perhaps) escaped not only the modern museumgoer, but also Mantegna himself. Stepping past the allegorical content of the painting, Rossetti’s ekphrasis frees itself to dwell on the sensuous experience of the scene—to embody or become that experience.

Both poet and painter seem to apprehend the dancers with a sensuousness that evades all accounting. Yet even as the poem shrinks from “any irritable reaching after fact & reason,” in Keats’s phrase,² it offers a recalibration of meaning:

It is bitter glad
Even unto tears. Its meaning filleth it,
A secret of the wells of Life: to wit:—
The heart’s each pulse shall keep the sense it had
With all, though the mind’s labour run to nought.
(10–14)

The painting requires no allegorical supplement because “its meaning filleth it.” Meaning is the consummation of the artist’s labor of faithful attention, matched in the poem by Rossetti’s own fidelity. That is, Rossetti treats Mantegna’s painting with the same “fixedness of thought,” the same imaginative apperception, that the painter lavished on the dancers. If the allegory of Mantegna’s painting seems to fall casualty here to a deracinating or naïve aestheticism, though, one might respond simply that allegory has been relocated—or delayed. For Rossetti, meaning is not motive but possibility, one for which the artist’s devotion to his medium is the condition.

Devotion joins modern poet and Renaissance painter across the historical distance between them, even as Rossetti’s poem discovers its own modernity in pursuit of a past that must always elude it. In this respect, the sonnet exemplifies Rossetti’s Victorian modernism; its procedures of aesthetic recreation reflect both aspiration and loss. Beginning again where he imagines Mantegna to have begun, Rossetti’s poem is an accomplishment of desire—a desire necessarily left always wanting.