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Spring 2010 |
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Veils. A Reading of
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s St. Agnes of Intercession |
Fabio Camilletti |
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Mais les
ténèbres sont elles-mêmes des toiles |
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Où vivent,
jaillissant de mon œil par milliers, |
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Des êtres
disparus aux regards familiers. |
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– Charles
Baudelaire, Obsession |
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I inquire here into
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s unfinished short story St. Agnes of Intercession (1850) analyzing how uncertainty shapes
the text and its structure.[1] In the course of my reading, I will
frequently refer to Dante’s Vita Nova,
translated by Rossetti in the 1840s and widely metamorphosed within the
story. Composed at the end of the
thirteenth century, the Vita Nova can
be considered as the culminating point of a definition of literary
subjectivity progressively emerging in courtly lyric since the twelfth.[2] Through its combination of prose and verse,
and via the predominance of a strongly self-constituted authorship, the Vita Nova performs the figure of an auctor who makes a selection of his
previous poetic experiments and orders them along the narrative plan of an
erotic and theoretical discovery.[3] My hypothesis is that the translation of
such a text, as a predominant part of Rossetti’s poetic apprenticeship,
provides him with a literary paragon through which he comes to question the
problem of literary subjectivity as posed in the Victorian age.[4] St. Agnes
of Intercession can be thus considered as one of Rossetti’s attempts (the
other being the sonnet-sequence The
House of Life) to compose a Vita
Nova for his own time. In the same
way as Dante had questioned such crucial cores of medieval culture as those
of auctoritas, of literary
personifications and of medical-psychological description of love in his book
of youth, so in St. Agnes Rossetti
confronts the Victorian problems of influence, of the ghostly presence of the
past and of the representation of a disjointed and deconstructed self. |
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St. Agnes of Intercession can hence be read as an afterimage of Dante’s
erotic, poetic and metaphysical speculation.
As Terry Castle pointed out, the Uncanny is to be interpreted as a
“toxic side effect” of Enlightenment, a metamorphosis undergone by the
pre-Enlightenment supernatural after the paradigmatic break of early
contemporaneousness.[5] The uncanniness of St. Agnes (related to its genre as well as to its oblique
presence in Rossetti’s oeuvre) can be therefore interpreted as the outcome of
a fateful operation of cultural translation.
And if we asked ourselves a question once posed by Harold Bloom,
namely if Dante’s Beatrice ultimately has an autonomous existence, so to
allow others than Dante to evoke her, our answer would be that yes, she
does. Still, speaking from a
post-Freudian perspective, we should also add that no exhumation is without
consequences, and that such a comeback would (as in Rossetti’s case) be helplessly
corrupted by the means of its return.[6] |
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This corruption is
what I call here the vagueness and undecidability of St. Agnes: my purpose is not however to underline how that of
Rossetti is a misreading of Dante (definitely it is), but rather to explore
such an undecidability as an absence, identifiable with the “non-sense” defined
by Lacan in his seminar of 1964.[7] Since the 1980s we have witnessed a wide
reading of medieval love poetry under the light of contemporary theory, from
psychoanalysis to gender studies.[8] In these studies, the faithfulness of
Romantic and Victorian re-elaborations of such texts has been largely
questioned, undergoing a systematic process of demystification. A key question has been therefore
underestimated, namely if it is precisely because of the peculiarities individuated
in such texts (such as the notions of subjectivity and authorship there
implied, as well as the floating and tensive definitions of desire and gender
relations constructed by them) that medieval courtly materials, including the
Vita Nova, have been used in the
nineteenth century as a cultural paragon against Petrarchism, or, better,
against the normalization underwent by Petrarchism after the
Renaissance. From this perspective, of
course, “Petrarch” has the same value as “Raphael” in the notion of
“Pre-Raphaelitism”, that is as a mere (and clearly reductive) definition of
sterile formalism, opposed to the avant-garde’s programmatic harshness. The rediscovery of medieval love poetry is
a backward movement, retracing in an idealized past a cultural perspective in
order to frame and interpret the manifold tensions of modernity. The purpose of my essay is precisely to
analyse the forms of such a metamorphosis, through which an unfinished
fantastic tale, whose writing is meant to be the most faithful attempt to
translate Dante’s experience in the inferno
of Victorian London, can be read as an eloquent allegory of the aporias
of the primitivist utopia and of modernity itself. |
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*** |
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1. In
Rossetti’s oeuvre, St. Agnes of
Intercession seems to stand as a shadowy and uncanny object. Posthumously published in the Collected Works of 1886, its
composition is rhapsodic and tormented.
Rossetti probably started working on it at the end of the 1840s,
concurrently with or after the completion of his other short story, Hand and Soul. The first allusion to St. Agnes can be found in William Michael Rossetti’s
notebooks. On the entry of 21st March
1850 Dante Gabriel is said to be “now engaged […] on a tale entitled An Autopsychology”; the first manuscript
dates however not later than 1848, and the title is The St. Agnes at Perugia (An Autopsychology).[9] Other redrafting attempts take place in the
early 1850s (the incomplete sketch of this version is titled St. Agnes of Recompensation) and in 1870, when Rossetti makes a
fair copy of the story during the editorial work for the Poems.[10] At this stage the story’s title is the
definitive St. Agnes of Intercession. Eventually, William Michael testifies that
his brother “again paid some attention to it in the last two or three months
of his life, but without writing anything additional, or even revising the
extant portion”. He adds that “the
written portion of the tale may be surmised to constitute less than half of
the projected whole”, and apparently Dante Gabriel had told Hall Caine “that
it would only be about a third”.[11] |
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Such a complex elaboration is meaningful: while crossing Rossetti’s
authorial career in its crucial phases, from the foundation of the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1848) and the meeting with Elizabeth Siddal
(1850) to the last months of his life (1882), the fragmentary nature of St. Agnes seems to haunt his work by
the constant deferral of any definitive elaboration. Since there is no ending to the story, such
incompleteness also determines a peculiar ambiguity regarding its genre:
quite surely a fantastic tale, more or less belonging to the tradition of the
“uncanny portraits”, from Poe to
Wilde and via Balzac’s Le chef-d’œuvre
inconnu. |
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The role played by St. Agnes in Rossetti’s work can be
partially explained, I argue, by considering that its first, projected title
– An Autopsychology – can be
eloquently found in another work of Rossetti’s, namely the introduction to Dante and His Circle (1874). Dante’s Vita
Nova was there defined as the “autobiography, or autopsychology, of
[Dante’s] youth”. The Vita Nova, Rossetti asserted, was “a
book which only youth could have produced, and which must chiefly remain
sacred to the young; to each of whom the figure of Beatrice, less lifelike
than lovelike, will seem the friend of his own heart” (CW II, 1-3). More or less
consciously, in that definition Rossetti staged a singular contamination
between a passage of Dante’s Convivio
(where the Vita Nova was defined as
a “fervid and passionate work”, as it was “suitable” to a young age: I, i,
16-17) and the beginning of Goethe’s Werther,
where the anonymous collector’s hope was that the book could become the
reader’s friend. In accordance with
the myth of the “young Dante” arisen in Europe around the years 1840, the Vita Nova was thereby read as the
account of a young poet’s love vicissitudes.
The notion of “autopsychology”, however, testified a deeper immersion
of Rossetti’s in Dante’s writing technique, as well as in the “little book”’s
newness within the tradition of medieval love poetry. [12] |
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It is eloquent, I think, that the place
chosen for translating Dante’s experience in Rossetti’s time is a literary
work belonging to the genre of the fantastic.
Even more, it is a literary work which is fully self-conscious of its
fictitious nature, as it is evident by the operation made by Rossetti
regarding the story’s epigraph: where in the first version a passage from
Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound which
included a reference to the Doppelgänger
theme (“The Magus Zoroaster […]/Met his own image walking in the garden”)
interacted with a Tristram Shandy
pastiche, in subsequent versions of the story only the latter is left, as to
suggest an intrinsically mystifying nature of the text. The paratextual effect of the
pseudo-quotation from Sterne acts on a double level: if, while evoking Tristram Shandy, the tale is
automatically inscribed in a tradition of literary irony, the pastiche concerns the act itself of storytelling, thereby implicitly asserting
that there are as many stories as many people telling them, and that every
tale is ultimately a meaningless embroidery around the narrator’s own
obsessions: |
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“In all my life […],” quoth my uncle
Toby, “I have never heard a stranger story than one which was told me by a
sergeant in Maclure's regiment, and which, with your permission, Doctor, I
will relate.” |
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“No stranger, brother Toby,” said my
father testily, “than a certain tale to be found in Slawkenbergius […], and
called by him the History of an Icelandish Nose.” |
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“Nor than the golden legend of Saint
Anschankus of Lithuania,” added Dr.
Slop, “who, being troubled digestively while delivering his discourse
‘de sanctis sanctorum,’ was tempted by the Devil in imagine vasis in
contumeliam,-- which is to say,-- in the form of a vessel unto dishonour.” |
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Now Excentrio, as one mocking, sayeth,
etc., etc.--TRISTRAM SHANDY. (CW I,
399) |
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Since the beginning St. Agnes is then a complex
interweaving of influences and language registers, at least alluding to a
double reading option. Here that of
parody: the text objectifies and defines itself as a literary construct, not
to be taken seriously nor even as a faithful account of the narrator’s (if
not of the author’s) psychology; there, that of fantastic tale, so to say a
genre marked by a clear predominance of subjectivity, expressed by the use of
first-person narration. As in the
‘liar paradox’, the two elements are mutually excluding: true and false at
the same time, they determine an interpretative short-circuit obstructing any
possibility of resolving the text’s undecidability.[13] And if it is true that such a technique is
one of the constituting elements of the fantastic tale, through which the
supernatural or rational explanation of referred facts is kept suspended,
Rossetti’s possible inspirations for its use did probably not belong uniquely
to fantastic literature. Since the
first paragraph, the Vita Nova itself
is distinguished by an “I” who – adopting the metaphor used by Dante, and
widely diffused in medieval culture – “copies” and “interprets” the “words”
written in the “book of memory”.[14] The backward glance of such an Ego, who re-interprets
and gives significance to its memories in the very moment of recollection,
characterizes the Vita Nova by an
inextricable intertwinement of time-plans, alternating between the “time” of
past events and the “eternity” of their final, providential meaning.[15] |
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Besides, the Vita Nova is constellated by visions
and apparitions, which can be fictive and allegorical personifications of
inner conflicts (as Dante states explicitly while speaking of the Provencal
god of Love, cf. CW II, 70-73), dreams and “imaginations” (as that of Beatrice’s
death, cf. CW II, 63) or prophetic visions acting as mystic revelations (as
the “wonderful vision” ending the book, cf.
CW II, 95). In Rossetti’s transliterations, these
psycho-theatrical embodiments play an ambiguous role: read within the frame
of a Blakean and visionary conception of art, they are primarily transformed
into uncanny manifestations, whose supernatural or rational explanation is
left undecided, as in fantastic tales, by a predominance of subjective
perception. An eloquent example is
that of the narrator’s dream, taking place after the visit at the Perugia
gallery and meant as an ambiguous prophecy of Mary Arden’s death to come: |
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I dreamt that I was in London, at the
exhibition […]; but in the place of my picture […] there hung the St. Agnes
of Perugia. A crowd was before it; and
I heard several say that […] the painter (naming me) was dead. At this, a woman […] began to weep: I
looked at her and perceived it to be Mary.
She had her arm in that of a man who appeared to wear a masquerade
dress; his back was towards me, and he was busily writing on some tablets;
but […] I saw that his pencil left no mark where it passed […]. I spoke to Mary, but she continued crying
and did not look up. I then touched
her companion on the shoulder […] and told him to resign that lady’s arm to
me, as she was my bride. He then
turned round suddenly, and showed me my own face with the hair and beard
quaintly cut, as in the portrait of Bucciuolo. After looking mournfully at me, he said,
“Not mine, friend, but neither thine:” and while he spoke, his face fell in
like a dead face. Meantime, every one
seemed pale and uneasy, and they began to whisper in knots; and all at once I
found opposite me the critic I met at the gallery, who was saying something I
could not understand, but so fast that he panted and kept wiping his
forehead. Then my dream changed. I was going upstairs to my room at home,
where I thought Mary was waiting to sit for her portrait. The staircase was quite dark; and as I went
up, the voices of several persons I knew passed by me, as if they were
descending; and sometimes my own among them.
I […] was feeling for the handle of the door, when it was opened
suddenly by an angel; and looking in, I saw, not Mary, but a woman whose face
was hidden with white light, and who had a lamb beside her that was bleating
aloud. She knelt in the middle of the
room, and I heard her say several times: “O Lord, it is more than he can
bear. Spare him, O Lord, for her sake
whom he consecrated to me.” After this, music came out of heaven, and I
thought to have heard speech; but instead, there was silence that woke
me. (CW I, 419-20) |
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The dream is an
interlacing of images from the Vita
Nova. The man who holds Mary’s arm
recalls the god of Love who brings the lady away from her lover’s sight (CW II, 33). Described as “a lord of terrible aspect”,
Love seems “to rejoice inwardly”;
then, after Beatrice has eaten Dante’s heart, “all his joy […] turned into
most bitter weeping; […] he gathered the lady into his arms, and […] he went
with her up towards heaven” (CW II,
32-33). At the same time, the man draws invisible
lines “on some tablets”, in the way Dante had referred to have done on the
first anniversary of Beatrice’s death (“remembering me of her as I sat alone,
I betook myself to draw the resemblance of an angel upon certain tablets”, CW II, 84). The Provençal god of Love can
be retraced also in the figure who “was saying something I could not
understand’: in the first dream of the Vita
Nova, Love ‘said many things, among the which I could understand but few”
(CW II, 32).
Still, the strongest metamorphosis is undergone by the “fallacious”
dream concerning Beatrice’s death: |
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Then, feeling bewildered, I closed mine
eyes ; and my brain began to be in travail as the brain of one frantic, and
to have such imaginations as here follow.
[…] it seemed to me that I saw certain faces of women with their hair
loosened, which called out to me, “Thou shalt surely die;” after the which,
other terrible and unknown appearances said unto me, “Thou art dead.” At
length […] I came to be I knew not where, and to behold a throng of
dishevelled ladies wonderfully sad, who kept going hither and thither
weeping. […] while I wondered in my
trance, and was filled with a grievous fear, I conceived that a certain
friend came unto me and said : “Hast thou not heard? She that was thine
excellent lady hath been taken out of life.” Then I began to weep very
piteously; and not only in mine imagination, but with mine eyes, which were
wet with tears. And I seemed to look
towards Heaven, and to behold a multitude of angels who were returning
upwards, having before them an exceedingly white cloud : and these angels
were singing together gloriously, and the words of their song were these:
“Osanna in excelsis;” and there was no more that I heard. Then my heart that was so full of love said
unto me: “It is true that our lady lieth dead;” and it seemed to me that I
went to look upon the body wherein that blessed and most noble spirit had had
its abiding-place. […] this idle
imagining […] made me to behold my lady in death; whose head certain ladies
seemed to be covering with a white veil; and who was so humble of her aspect
that it was as though she had said, “I have attained to look on the beginning
of peace.” […] And when I had seen all those offices performed […] it seemed
to me that I went back unto mine own chamber, and looked up towards
Heaven. And so strong was my phantasy,
that I wept again in very truth, and said with my true voice: “O excellent
soul ! how blessed is he that now looketh upon thee !” […] Then […] this
strong imagination was brought suddenly to an end, at the moment that I was
about to say, “O Beatrice! peace be with thee.” And already I had said, “O
Beatrice!” when being aroused, I opened mine eyes, and knew that it had been
a deception. (CW II, 63-64) |
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Though quite long,
these two quotations are necessary in order to understand how Dante’s
“imagination” turns radically into an enigmatic and deadly fantasy. Bucciuolo draws, but his pencil leaves no
mark; the critic met by the protagonist at the gallery speaks, but no word is
understood; the narrator is awaken by an alienating silence. Eventually, which is most relevant, Dante’s
“deception” becomes a “dream […] not
without a mystic reality”: shaped by the influence of Dante’s “book of
memory”, first-person narration is used as a technique through which a dark
zone of knowledge can be conveyed, showing a splitting of the Subject between
“reality” and “otherness” and definitely matching “the perspectival use of
the first person” individuated by Francesco Orlando in the “supernatural of
ignorance” of fantastic literature.[16] Seen from this point of view, St. Agnes is hence an openly
pre-Freudian work, which can surely be read from a psychoanalytic
perspective, but which can also question crucial cores of psychoanalysis
itself, more indebted than it might seem (as Freud’s analyses of Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann or of Jensen’s Gradiva testify) to the
fantastic. Indeed, under its literary
surface, St. Agnes features
elements which we could not hardly identify as fetishism, compulsion to
repeat, substitution and condensation, as if fantastic literature had staged
a set of uncanny metaphors in order to frame questions later developed by the
psychoanalytical discourse. The
unrepresented icon of St. Agnes stands then, in a fully Freudian sense, as a
vanishing point of desire intersecting childhood libido and adult fantasies
(“My life had been, as it were, drawn by, and the child and the man brought
together”, CW I, 409), staging love
as a fantasmatic repetition (expressed in the tale under the metaphor of
metempsychosis) of a “primary scene” condensed around an image. It is also interesting to remark the
crucial role played by the family in the story: the future fiancée, for
example, is a friend of the narrator’s sister, met precisely via his sister
and since the beginning inserted in the family circle, as to keep everything
in a familiar environment where incest is purely metaphorical (the same “air
of family”, we can add, of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, structured as a
familiar circle where women are indistinctly and concurrently spouses,
sisters or lovers to everyone).[17] Most of all, it is eloquent how the text
shows a somehow hampered structure where everything is delayed, from the
discovery of the picture to the systematically deferred marriage, and for
which it is difficult not to evoke the Freudian notion of “resistance”. The trip to Italy, always projected by
Rossetti and never concretely attempted, can be therefore seen as an open
metaphor for anamnesis, for the retracing of an Italian “familiar romance”
whose outcome is expressed (in a way that would have delighted Freud) with an
archaeological metaphor: |
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I was as one who, coming after a
wilderness to some city dead since the first world, should find among the
tombs a human body in his own exact image, embalmed; having the blackened
coin still within its lips, and the jars still at its side, in honour of gods
whose very names are abolished. (CW I,
417) |
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Through the
ambiguity between personal anamnesis and historical quest, the primitivist
and Pre-Raphaelite dream of the past is then intermingled with an archaeology
of the self: the research for Bucciuolo’s St.
Agnes, led through a peregrination in a chaotic, Grand Tour Italy, corresponds to an “autopsychology” retracing in
childhood the first embryos of adult obsessions, and whose outcome is
eventually the acknowledgment of influences which unconsciously shape
affections and style. The incessant
travel through galleries and museums as living images of a historicized
objectification of the past, reverberates in an inner research through a
gallery (an afterimage of the Renaissance “palace of memory”) ordered and
structured as a museum.[18] |
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The plot of St. Agnes is hence somehow parallel
and opposite to that of Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva:
where, in St. Agnes, the
supernatural hypothesis stands as an explanation for a childhood love, in
Jensen’s story, written in 1907 after the birth of psychoanalysis, Norbert
Hanold’s delirium masks an infancy reminiscence with the impossible illusion
of a ghostly return. The same
ambiguity can be witnessed in Freud’s The
Uncanny, where the two plans of personal recollection and historical
memory are deliberately superimposed: the uncanny is either a feeling
engendered by something which was familiar in childhood and then has come
back in adult life as return of the repressed, and by something believed in
“archaic times” and suddenly glimpsing as real in a rationalistic time.[19] St. Agnes
is an uncanny tale since it stages an analogue phantasmal time-relation,
namely the return of a repressed individual and of a historical past. The narrator’s painting, which is
uncanny precisely in being at the same time Victorian and medieval, English and Italian
(and both beyond the painter’s intentions), is structured as a compromise
formation, thus eliding the principle of non-contradiction and fusing the two
terms of the antinomy in an undecipherable sign: “my work,” writes Rossetti,
“being in subject, costume, and accessories, English, and of the present
period, could scarcely have been expected to suggest so striking an affinity
in style to the productions of one of the earliest Italian painters” (CW I, 410). |
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*** |
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2. In
closely analysing the tale, we witness that the structure of compromise
formation is widely disseminated in the text.
Such a structure works even at the immediately perceivable level of
language through tropes: the rhetorical devices employed in St. Agnes are from this point of view
manifold, from negation and rhetorical questions (“How had I not at once
recognized, in her I loved, the dream of my childhood?”, CW I, 409) to irony (the epigraph, CW I, 399; the fake Pre-Raphaelite poem read by the critic,
406-07), from oxymoron (“exquisite fear”, CW
I, 417), to litotes (“a certain mental approximation, not easily
defined”, CW I, 412; “my dream of
that night […] was not without a mystic reality”, CW I, 419) and undecidability (“a strong and indefinable charm”, CW I, 400), and eventually to chaotic
enumeration (“astonishment, admiration, perplexity, helpless of conjecture,
and an almost painful sense of love”, CW
I, 414). |
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Such strategies, it
is evident, are meant to render an irreducible core of meaning through the
surface of language: structurally speaking, St. Agnes is articulated upon a series of binary oppositions,
whose antinomian dialectic determines a systematic shift and superimposition
to and on each other. The first one,
of course, is that between rationalistic and supernatural explanations, which
is somehow intrinsic to the tale’s genre: still, the text introduces many
others, from that between childhood recollections and adult desires to those
which are a kind of constant presences in Rossetti’s oeuvre, such as Italy
and England, literature and painting, Middle-Ages and modernity, the “age of
revolutions” (embodied by “the great tunes which have rung the world’s
changes since ’89”, CW I, 399) and
the Victorian age. Far from stating
the irremediable opposition between the two terms of the antinomy, however,
Rossetti tends to compose them in an ambiguous and often not completely
graspable unity: the character itself played by him throughout his life (in
other words, his auto-staging as an artist and author) is a clear symptom of
such a tendency, through which Rossetti performs an ambiguous ‘model’ of
artist, at the same time poet and painter, English and Italian, and
ultimately vanguardist despite (or precisely because of) being “mediæval and
unmodern” (William Michael Rossetti).[20] How is it possible, Rossetti asks, that a
“work, being in subject, costume, and accessories, English, and of the present
period”, can show “so striking an affinity in style to the productions of one
of the earliest Italian painters” (CW I,
410)? The problem is the same posed by St.
Agnes as a narrative object: namely, the possibility of writing a Vita Nova in the nineteenth century,
and of replicating Dante’s experience in such a radically changed context as
that of Victorian England. Rossetti’s
question is thus, despite every Ruskinian proclamation, drastically
anti-primitivist and anti-revivalist since the beginning: its aim is not to
look for a possibility to make the past relive, but rather for a hybridism,
for an art which could be capable of being medieval and Victorian at the same time: |
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The subject was a modern one, and indeed
it has often seemed to me that all work, to be truly worthy, should be
wrought out of the age itself, as well as out of the soul of its producer,
which must needs be a soul of the age.
(CW I, 402) |
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The idea of
metempsychosis (with which Rossetti played widely, most notably in the poem Sudden Light), as well as the Doppelgänger theme (explored in the watercolour How They Met Themselves or in the poem
The Bride’s Prelude), are therefore
the literary expedients through which such programmatic poetics are
conveyed. The “odd-looking” nature of
such works (as the narrator’s painting is in St. Agnes defined by the critic, CW I, 407) is the sign of the out-of-time undecidability of the
work of art, engendering what Jerome McGann – referring to the first version
of Beata Beatrix (1864) – calls a
“double perspective”. In this
painting, which can be considered as one of the possible fulfilments of the
programmatic task outlined in Rossetti’s writings of youth, “details from
nineteenth-century London are superimposed on thirteenth-century
Florence”. In a specular way to that
of the narrator’s painting in St. Agnes,
where a modern subject showed an impalpable affinity with an early Italian
work of art, in Beata Beatrix a
medieval Italian subject subtly evokes a Victorian scene. As McGann puts it: |
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The river, the central figure, and the
distant city might be seen as the Arno, Beatrice, and Florence, with the
Ponte Vecchio and perhaps the Campanile also visible. But a shift of our affections brings to
view the Thames and the Old Battersea Bridge, south London, and Elizabeth
Siddal.[21] |
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In the text of St. Agnes, this “double perspective”
is staged through the interaction of two paintings: a modern one (suggesting
a “striking […] affinity in style to the productions of one of the earliest
Italian painters”, CW I, 410) and a
Quattrocento one (which is the “surpassingly perfect resemblance of a woman
now living and breathing”, CW I,
416). The one is hence the other’s
double: both belong to their own time, since the modern work is “in subject,
costume, and accessories, English, and of the present period” (CW I 410), while Bucciuolo’s St. Agnes is described through a vivid
ékphrasis as dressed “in the costume of the painter’s time” (CW I, 414), an expression that
Rossetti had eloquently already used in Hand
and Soul (“paint me thus, as I am, to know me: weak, as I am, and in the
weeds of this time”, CW I,
394-95). Still, the two paintings are
connected by a je ne sais quoi: a
certain something, however, which cannot be completely shown, which just
shines on the canvas’s surface and which can only be alluded to through the
supply of rhetorical devices. The two
paintings’ uncanny reciprocity is only rendered by means of circumlocutions:
the connection between them, as well as with the physical person of Mary
Arden, is expressed by such ambiguous expressions as “sympathy of relation”,
“likeness” (CW I, 409), “affinity
in style” (CW I, 410), “feeling and
manner” (CW I, 412). |
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From this point of
view, the dialectic staged by Rossetti between his literary and pictorial work
is notable, and particularly regarding his two short stories. Despite his constantly pursued project of a
liber pictus, and although both
tales are literary portraits as well as artistic manifestos, Rossetti’s
attempts to illustrate them, fail systematically, perhaps not by chance. In the same entry of the P.R.B. Journal where St. Agnes is firstly mentioned,
William Michael also wrote that his brother had finished the design of
“Chiaro’s painting”: in the Memoir of
1895, however, he speaks of an etching “representing Chiaro in the act of
painting his Soul”, whose result “displeased” Dante Gabriel so much “that, in
his vehement mood, he tore up the impression, and scratched the plate over”.[22] And while William Michael admits that “I
hardly think I ever saw the picture” and that “would gladly do so now, were
that but possible”,[23] the anecdote keeps a peculiar flavour of
mystery, most of all since the subject itself of the painting is
undetermined, emblematically shifting between 1850 and 1895 from “Chiaro’s
painting” to “Chiaro in the act of painting”.
The first option is the more likely to be true: as I argued elsewhere,
the only surviving sketch for this etching is to be individuated in a Study of a Young Girl dated 1849,
where the posture clearly uncovers the girl to be Chiaro’s soul (as the gold
ground suggests her iconic nature), but where the style operates a drastic
warp from the one in the text.[24] Instead of a Pre-Raphaelite ligne claire, the drawing is violently
sketched in chiaroscuro; the girl’s eyes, far from having the quiet and
earnest expression of the story, are strongly circled in black pencil,
suggesting an anxiety which stands as the most inner and unsaid core of Hand and Soul’s joyful, neo-medieval utopia.
Still, the ambiguity is deeper: and most of all since the story of the
destroyed drawing, in William Michael’s notes to the Collected Works of 1886 (and also in those of the Works of 1911), is referred to an
etching meant to illustrate St. Agnes: |
|
He began an etching to illustrate it;
but threw this aside in disgust at his failure in technique. Sir John Millais then undertook to execute
the etching. His production was
included in the great Millais exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1886,
and manifestly represents the hero of the story painting the portrait of his
affianced bride during her mortal illness.
[…] At a later date, Rossetti himself painted the like incident, in
its mediæval phase, under the title of Bonifazio’s Mistress.[25] |
|
The purpose of
illustrating his own literary portraits is therefore, for Rossetti, doomed
from the beginning: the attempts at painting scenes from the stories or the portraits
described in the texts, fatefully meet a “failure in technique”. The same happens with Bonifazio’s Mistress, a subject including three drawings and a
watercolour, and realized between 1856 and 1860. The subject, as William Michael
acknowledged, is clearly that of St. Agnes:
a late-medieval lady, dressed in a flourishing Venetian style, is dead or
agonizing; two ladies assist her, while at her feet stands a painter, and
behind her shoulder we see her recently accomplished portrait. Still, the reason for the title is unclear:
it has been connected to Fazio degli Uberti, because of a song translated in The Early Italian Poets as His Portrait of his Lady, Angiola of
Verona (CW II, 381-83) and of a
painting of 1863 titled Fazio’s
Mistress (but renamed Aurélia
in 1873 as a homage to Gérard de Nerval).
The realisation of these drawings is placed outside any phase of St. Agnes’s complex elaboration: it is
likely that Rossetti had thought again of a possible, visual accomplishment
of the story, or even conceived the visual dimension as the right collocation
in order to translate the obsessive image sketched in the text. Still, just like St. Agnes, Bonifazio’s
Mistress remains incomplete and isolated: only re-elaborated several
times with minor amendments, it somehow meets the same fate of its literary
counterpart. |
|
It is therefore
legitimate to ask why Rossetti didn’t seem to be able to paint the portraits
he had conceived on a literary basis.
Once sketched, Chiaro’s “figura mistica” is discovered to be haunted
by an impalpable alterity (CW I,
395n); Bucciuolo’s uncanny portrait is only drafted in the backdrop of Bonifazio’s Mistress, a drawing
attempting to illuminate the story but ultimately left apart in favour of a
fuzzy and constantly re-elaborated text.
The hybrid nature of Rossetti’s literary portraits, their “double
perspective”, will shine years later in Beata
Beatrix: and that painting too will be nothing more than an episodic unicum, doomed to engender a complex
game of refractions with another simulacrum (Elizabeth Siddal’s exhumed
body), and ultimately deactivated in later versions, in which Rossetti, after
the exhumation, will systematically discharge the “double perspective” of the
first canvas.[26] |
|
St. Agnes of Intercession defines therefore an artistic perspective
which remains un-followed and undefined, the space of an uncanny je ne sais quoi situated in the domain
of images and ungraspable by any theoretical definition. Deferred in denotation, ambiguously
situated in the domain of ‘style’, such a space is only alluded by means of
periphrases, via the structure of a fragmentary story systematically hampered
in its plot. The textual dimension is
the only one through which such an uncertainty can be conveyed, precisely insofar as it produces undecidability
and an indefinable unsaid: in the course of this process, the text produces
what I will call its “veils”, namely the points of resistance – charged with
tension and oblivion – in which the text’s dichotomies collide. As spaces of concretization of tensive
conflicts, their effect shapes the text’s misty fuzziness, embodying its
uncanny and indefinable nature. |
|
*** |
|
3. In St. Agnes, everything seems to be
perceived through a veil, as to indefinitely procrastinate a revelation: the
structure of the story itself is that of a quest which can be seen as a
movement of progressive ‘unveiling’, constantly shifting between an inner
dimension of auto-analysis and the outside, objective dimension of an actual
detection. Still, every veil hides
other veils since the beginning. |
|
In the opening of
the story, the narrator watches the fire through his father’s knees, as one
looking through this oblique perception for a hypnotic-hallucinatory effect
(“till it burned my face […] till the music and the fire and my heart burned
together”, CW I, 399). His artistic vocation is explicitly said to
be confused and unperceivable, as through a veil (“What
was then the precise shape of the cloud within my tabernacle, I could
scarcely say now; or whether through so thick a veil I could be sure of its
presence there at all”, CW I,
400). The image of St. Agnes is firstly perceived not in
a direct way, but mediated by a book – “Hamilton’s ‘English Conoscente’ […] a
kind of continental tour […] sufficiently Della-Cruscan” (CW I, 400) – providing almost no
information on the work: the reproduction is an engraving “in the English
fashion of that day, executed in stipple and printed with red ink; tasteless
enough” (CW I, 400), thus
engendering a double mediation through which a medieval Italian work is
transmitted to the narrator’s Victorian sensibility by an eighteenth-century
visual translation. The book later
disappears: the very features of Bucciuolo’s St. Agnes are somehow hidden behind the veil of oblivion (“the
once familiar features of the St. Agnes, forgotten since childhood”, CW I, 409), standing like a “shadow”
or a “cloud” confusing memory and actual evidence (“the cloud was still about me, and the street seemed to pass me like a
shadow […] that which had cast the shadow of a man’s love in the path of
the child, and left the seed at his heart to work its growth blindly in darkness, was surely much more than
chance”, CW I, 409, my
italics). Even Mary Arden, when
appearing for the first time, is not directly perceived: back home after a
class, the narrator hears some voices coming from his room, and is then
introduced to Mary by his sister; still, this perception too remains oblique,
since “she had her back to the window, and I could not well see her features
at the moment; but I made sure she was very beautiful, from her tranquil body
and the way that she held her hands” (afterwards, he will say that she was
“more beautiful” than he had thought at first, CW I, 401-02). Mary’s
beauty is never directly beheld: “her beauty seemed to grow on my sight by
gazing, as the stars do in water” (CW I,
402), as if gaze was a filter, or a distorted mirror altering
perception. Her resemblance to
Bucciuolo’s St. Agnes is eventually
recognized by the critic, and only subsequently acknowledged by the narrator:
“‘The head of your woman there’ (and he pointed to the figure painted from
Mary) ‘is exactly like a St. Agnes of [Bucciuolo Angiolieri] at
Bologna’. A flash seemed to strike
before my eyes as he spoke” (CW I,
409). Equally, in the course of the
travel to Italy, the St. Agnes systematically
“eludes” the protagonist (CW I,
411). A set of impediments is
constantly staged between the narrator and the painting, reaching its peak in
Perugia: here, the narrator is obliged to wait for three days before being
admitted in the gallery (the biblical flavour of such a delay is probably not
unintentional), so to create a peculiar sense of suspense before seeing the picture
in the last of the gallery’s rooms (“as I entered I felt my heart choke me as
if with some vague apprehension”, CW I,
413). And when the picture is finally
revealed, the possibility that everything could not be anything else than a
creation of his personal delirium, projects a definite veil on the unfinished
story. |
|
What happens,
therefore, is an ambiguous revelation, which is artistic and at the same time
erotic. Firstly, the story delineates
a mechanic of influence as an impalpable and maybe “unconscious” “sympathy of
relation”, through which the original painting “all substantial record” being
lost – is perceived as “an unreal dream” (CW
I, 410). And eventually, while
beholding several works by Bucciuolo in Italian galleries, the narrator
acknowledges that |
|
despite the wide difference both of
subject and occasional treatment, a certain mental approximation, not easily
defined, to the style of my own productions.
The peculiarities of feeling and manner which had attracted my boyish
admiration had evidently sunk deep, and maintained, though hitherto
unperceived, their influence over me.
(CW I, 412) |
|
From the point of
view of artistic theorization, hence, St.
Agnes stages a notion of influence operating in a subtle way, through
which art objects are possessed “beyond the knowledge or control of the
artist”.[27] It is not difficult to notice an analogous
acknowledgment in the Freudian statement of the Ego no longer being “master
in its own house”, even if, as Robert Douglas-Fairhurst suggests, the
Victorian discourse on influence is already “detecting another hand in one’s
writing”. This is strictly connected
with spiritualistic practices and therefore linked to the notion of
“afterlife” as a form of confronting “those questions of change, continuity,
and continuity-through-change which were actively embodied in [the
Victorians’] own methods of composition”.[28] Influence acts as a haunting, not
perceivable even to the Subject (Freud would say: precisely to the Subject)
and which can be individuated only by the external gaze of the
critic-analyst: |
|
“Stay a minute,” ejaculated my friend
the critic; “I am trying to think what the style of your picture is
like. It is like the works of a very
early man that I saw in Italy.
Angioloni, Angellini, Angiolieri,-- that was the name, -- Bucciuolo
Angiolieri. He always turned the toes
in. […] The name mentioned was a part
of my first recollections; and the picture he spoke of... […] I gazed fixedly on the work of my own
hands; and thought turned in my brain like a wheel. (CW I, 408-09) |
|
Besides, the
revelation concerns the mechanics of love and desire. Mary is firstly perceived as a voice, then
by a name evoking echoes (“I remembered to have heard the lady’s name
before”, CW I, 401), and eventually
as an indiscernible shadow: standing against a window, she is perceived only
by her silhouette, although her body and hand posture suggest her
beauty. Obliquely beholden, “as stars
[…] in water” (CW I, 402), and
therefore never visible if not through the transfiguration of the narrator’s
subjective perception, she will become manifest – to the subject and to the
reader – only when her features are retraced in Bucciuolo’s painting. The philosophy of love outlined by St. Agnes stages then desire as a
dialectic relationship between the subject and an image, either mental or
externalized-metaphorized as a painting: and if such an acknowledgment has
for sure openly psychoanalytical implications, we should not forget that an
analogous conception of love could have reached Rossetti through the
mediation of medieval courtly literature.
St. Agnes stages a game of
refractions constantly moving between several images, from an engraving to a
childhood memory, from the features of a living girl to an English Victorian
painting and eventually to a medieval Italian one. And it will be interesting to remark that
such a plurality of meanings floating around the notion of “image” – a mental
one standing behind the narrator’s love and his own painting, the resemblance
individuated between Mary and Bucciuolo’s portrait, the object-painting
constituting the subject itself of the story – corresponds quite strikingly
to the medieval polysemy of the word imago. In Western medieval culture, actually, imago denotes at least three concepts:
the ontological and cognitive relations between Father and Son in the notion
of Trinity, as well as between God and the human being (“et creavit Deus
hominem ad imaginem suam”, Genesis I,
27a); the res created by humans,
either as pictorial or sculpted images or as language figures (tropes); and,
eventually, any form of immaterial or mental image, from dreams to mirror
reflections, from ghosts to illusions.[29] These three acceptations collide and
interact in the philosophy of love defined by courtly literature: as Giorgio
Agamben argued, courtly love is a “falling in love through a shadow” whose
reference myth is that of Pygmalion as staged in the Roman de |
|
It is therefore
possible, I think, to read St. Agnes through
medieval courtly love, and more specifically through the young Dante’s
singular re-elaboration (an Aufhebung,
as it has been defined)[32] of courtly love in the Vita Nova. I have
previously referred to the image of the “veil”: my choice was not casual,
since the notion of “veil” is fully Dantean, and, at the same time,
Rossettian. In the Vita Nova, as well as in the Comedy, the veil is crucial, both literally and metaphorically. In the first dream mentioned by Dante,
Beatrice is perceived as “sleeping, covered only with a blood-coloured cloth”
(CW II, 32); in the dream
concerning her death, as we have seen, “certain ladies seemed to be covering
[her head] with a white veil” (CW II,
63). Until the Comedy, Beatrice will be no longer physically staged in Dante’s
text: in Purgatory, showing herself
at the end of an allegorical parade, she will reappear covered by a veil (“in
white veil with olive wreath’d,/A virgin in my view appear’d, beneath/Green
mantle, rob’d in hue of living “ Purg. XXX, 31-33, transl. H.
F. Cary). Besides, as Robert Pogue Harrison argued,
the image of the veil can be broadened to the textual dimension of the Vita Nova itself, and of Dante’s
oeuvre as a whole:[33] like St.
Agnes, the Vita Nova is the
systematic unveiling of the “substance” of events inscribed in Dante’s book
of memory, namely the recognition of a providential plan of the “eternal” in
the domain of “time” (“the true meaning of that vision was not then perceived
by any one, though it be now evident to the least skilful”, CW II, 34). The notion of the veil is eventually evoked
in the Comedy, where Dante invites
the reader to admire the “doctrine hiding […] beneath the veil of these odd
verses” (Inf. IX, 61-63): the veil covering Beatrice’s
body in the book of youth has become symbol and paradigm for the multiplicity
of meanings articulated in the text. |
|
Such an image was
surely familiar to Rossetti. The
quoted lines from the Inferno had
literally provided the bases for his father’s exoteric reading of Dante’s
oeuvre, founded on what has precisely been called a “paradigm of the veil”.[34] And in Gabriele Rossetti’s latest work, the
posthumously published La Beatrice di
Dante (1842), Provençal courtly love and the Vita Nova were explained as the survival of a Gnostic “religion
of the mind”[35] through which the adept worshipped his own
soul, visualized as a feminine image.
The veil is therefore, from this perspective, what hides the
intrinsically solipsistic nature of any artistic operation: the quest for the
St. Agnes is actually an
“autopsychology”, insofar as St. Agnes-Blanzifiore-Mary Arden is first of all
“the glorious Lady of [the] mind” (CW II,
30), an expression of the Vita Nova that
Rossetti read, as Hand and Soul shows,
in its strictest literal meaning. It
is in Hand and Soul that the veil
actually makes its first appearance: |
|
[Chiaro] knew her hair to be the golden
veil through which he beheld his dreams, the veil standing as an intermediary
point between the Subject and the unconscious, a visualized and
self-defensive image of femininity acting like a compromise formation. In the poem Sudden Light, the veil acts in the same way as a barrier between
the subject and anamnesis, masked, like in St. Agnes, as déjà vu: “But just when at the swallow’s soar/Your
neck turned so,/Some veil did fall,/– I knew it all of yore”, as if the fetishist
detail of the woman’s neck had allowed the reminiscence of a psychoanalytical
“original thing.[36] |
|
Following Francesco
Orlando, we can thus speak of a metamorphosis leading from a medieval
“supernatural of tradition” to the “supernatural of ignorance-uncertainty” of
Victorian London, “veiled or seen through a veil”[37]: the veil, as the exoteric paradigm, refuses
denotation in favour of a systematic connotation, never grasping an object
which is continuously deferred and situated beyond. Thereby the structure of St. Agnes as a hampered machine, in
which everything is continuously procrastinated and suspended: speaking in
terms of textual enjoyment, St. Agnes is
a deferred orgasm, a perverse game of retardation inducted by repetition and
interruption. Blocked in such a
vicious circle, the story cannot proceed, as the early etching for the tale
had shown Rossetti’s limits in technique and Bonifazio’s Mistress had been caught in the trap of multiple
reproductions. The image at the inner
core of St. Agnes – the imago connecting in a relationship of
uncanny similitude the features of Mary, of a medieval Italian portrait and
of a Victorian English one – is lost and hidden in such a profusion of veils,
as it had happened to the Catherine Lescault painted by Frenhofer in Balzac’s
Le chef-d’œuvre inconnu (1831),
covered by veils of colour and visible only to the artist’s own delirium. |
|
Maybe not by chance,
as in Balzac’s story – sharing with Rossetti’s the theoretical problem of
painting intellectual beauty – the place where this inner core becomes
manifest is style: lacking any other possible connection between a painting
realized in fifteenth-century Italy and one painted in the London of the
nineteenth, the space where such an affinity emerges is a je ne sais quoi situated in the impalpable
realm of manner, shaped by an influence dictated by unconscious (if not
supernatural) reasons. Like the
definition of the “uncanny”, that of “Je
ne sais quoi” is a non-definition, an aesthetic notion grounded on undecidability
and which cannot be rendered if not by negation (un-canny, un-heimlich,
je ne sais quoi) or by means of
oxymora (“almost painful sense of love”, “most lively and exquisite
fear”). In the same way as Freud
invoked a Bildersprache (figurative
language) in order to speak of the unconscious, the failure of any attempt to
paint his own story obliges Rossetti to go back to a textual dimension, to
entrap the ungraspable uncanniness of St.
Agnes in an interlacement of tropes.[38] |
|
The unfinished, unresolved and somehow awkwardly hampered structure of
St. Agnes appears then, far than
being an accident, as a strongly structural element: the veil in the eye, as
well as in the soul, “opens”, as Hélène Cixous writes, “the reign of an
eternal uncertainty that no prosthesis can dissipate”.[39] This “eternal uncertainty” is what Lacan, in
seminar XI, called “alienation” (aliénation),
one of the possible names for the uncanny:[40] alienation, in Lacan’s reading, is the undecidability
emerging in the intermediary area between the Subject (the “being”, l’être) and the Other (the sense): |
|
Le vel de l’aliénation se définit d’un
choix dont les propriétés dépendent de ceci, qu’il y a, dans la réunion, un
élément qui comporte que, quel que soit le choix qui s’opère, il a pour
conséquence un ni l’un, ni l’autre. Le
choix n’y est donc que de savoir si l’on entend garder une des parties, l’autre
disparaissant en tout cas. |
|
[…] Nous choisissions l’être, le sujet
disparaît, il nous échappe, il tombe dans le non-sens – nous choisissions le
sens, et le sens ne subsiste qu’écorné de cette partie de non-sens qui est
[…] ce qui constitue, dans la réalisation du sujet, l’inconscient.[41] |
|
The two plans of St. Agnes,
the literary portrait and the “autopsychology”, are from this perspective
inextricably connected, both falling in the field of “non-sense” insofar as
both look for something situated in the “beyond”. |
|
It is here, I think, that Rossetti’s
unearthing of courtly love – through the meditation, incorporation and the
game of transpositions operated over Dante’s text – reaches a point of
maximal tension. In his seminar on love, Encore (1972-73), Lacan dismissed nineteenth-century re-readings
of courtly love: “L’amour courtois a brillé dans l’histoire comme un météore
et on a vu revenir ensuite tout le bric-à-brac d’une renaissance prétendue
des vieilleries antiques. L’amour courtois est resté énigmatique”.[42] The crucial role played by Rossetti in such
a cultural rediscovery should, of course, suggest us to extend to him the
drastic cut of Lacan’s critique. Still,
our question of departure had been if it was precisely because of some
intrinsic nature of courtly love that the nineteenth century had chosen such
a “medieval and unmodern” material in order to mirror its own tensions, as
well as its questions regarding subjectivity, writing and desire. In courtly love,
Lacan said: |
|
La femme
idéalisée, |
|
Such a falling, as Slavoj Žižek argued, is
the root of fetishisation, of morsels of the body – hands, eyes, like in Hand and Soul – somehow ennobled by
concealing an absence, the whiteness of the Lady’s skin veiling (and alluding
to) the otherness she stands for.[44] In the same way, in Rossetti, the feminine
body is the reified outcome of an otherness perceived as suddenly fallen
(from Florence to the “inferno of London”), and become, in the forms of a
painting or of a dying-dead body, object-simulacrum. As Jean-Pierre Klotz writes, according to
Lacanian psychoanalysis “feminine eroticism is always something existing
behind a veil, and the veil is always something veiling an absence, it is the
surface on which an absence is projected”.[45] The veil constitutes itself as an
intermediate point between the subject and the Other, and – divided as it is
between the antithetic values of fetish-object and of phobic significant – it
produces the undecidability of an “almost painful sense of love” (CW I, 414). Indirectly, obliquely, Rossetti’s operation
is then more courtly and “mediæval” than it could seem at a first glance, and
the most so because of its programmatic choice for an upward movement with a
backward gaze. While disinterring
courtly love, Rossetti is caught in the same mechanics of desire,
displacement and fetishism staged by his sources, which have however become
the more uncanny as far as the paradigmatic structure in which they were
inserted (what Agamben calls the “discovery of the unreality of love, namely
of its fantasmatic character”) has decayed.[46] |
|
Exhumation –
Rossetti knew it well – is never a neutral act, whether its object is Dante
or Elizabeth Siddal’s corpse. Even
following the most vulgarized Freudianism, the object of a return is always
something else, the most subtle being the most uncanny, insofar as the
revenant’s familiarity shows impalpable glimpses of otherness. While, in Dante, Beatrice was a sign
denoting a specific meaning (in other words, there was something behind the
veil) in St. Agnes the veils are
superimposed one over the other, and the object is systematically placed
beyond: what stands behind the last veil remains unknown, whether it is one’s
own self (as in Hölderlin’s Hyperion,
or Novalis’s Die Lehrlinge zu Sais)
or nothing (as in Le chef-d’œuvre
inconnu). The same otherness
haunts Beata Beatrix, the painting
– as we have seen – where the programmatic instances of St. Agnes find their most fulfilled outcome, and which was by a
curious set of circumstances elaborated in a quite similar way as Bucciuolo’s
St. Agnes, closely before the death
of its sitter. In St. Agnes, the woman’s death is glorious: Blanzifiore dies in
silence, sitting heroically until the painting is finished, and the painter
decides to make of the portrait a perennial record of hers. He, Rossetti writes, “kept it always near
him during his lifetime, and, in dying, bequeathed it to the Church of Santa
Agnese dei Lavoranti, where he was buried at her side” (CW I, 416). Reality will
be far different, surely less heroic, and definitely more sorrowful. Elizabeth Siddal committed suicide, late at
night, in her own room. Rossetti tried
to give her a theatrical homage, as that of Bucciuolo’s, by burying the only
copy of his poems with her, but was forced to disinter her, years later, in
order to publish them. The picture for
which Elizabeth had been sitting, Beata
Beatrix, was accomplished, but slowly and through several years. It was afterwards sold and replicated in
many copies which show nothing of its original powerful nebulosity. And at his death – in the same days when he
“paid some attention” to his “autopsychology” of youth – Rossetti explicitly
asked to be buried in Birchington-on-Sea, while Elizabeth had been buried in
Highgate. |
|
v
Fabio Camilletti studied in Pisa, Oxford, Paris
and Birmingham, and is currently a fellow in Literature, Art History and
Psychoanalysis at the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. He collaborates with the Zibaldone Project at the Department of
Italian at the University of Birmingham, and has recently been appointed
Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Warwick. His research work focuses on Dante Gabriel
Rossetti and the nineteenth-century reception of Dante’s Vita Nova, on Sade, Leopardi, Warburg and on the Freudian notion
of the uncanny. He published Beatrice nell'inferno di Londra
(Trento, La Finestra, 2005), on Dante Gabriel Rossetti. His second book, Dante's Book of Youth. The
‘Vita Nova’ and the Nineteenth Century, is expected for 2011 (London,
IGRS Books). |
|
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