"Sisters in Art: Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal in Giotto Painting the Portrait of Dante (1852)"

"Sisters in Art: Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal in Giotto Painting the Portrait of Dante (1852)" Michele Martinez (bio) When christina Rossetti, at age seventeen, made her authorial debut in Verses (1847), the word poetess must have resounded in her ears.1 For female poets in the 1840s, the figure of classical Sappho loomed large as a paradigmatic antecedent: even Elizabeth Barrett Browning quipped privately to a friend: "I am 'little and black' like Sappho en attendant the immortality."2 As an author with transatlantic fame, Barrett Browning was redefining and updating the poetess figure that appeared in the pages of illustrated annuals and anthologies. Susan Brown characterizes the poetess as "a self-consciously feminine self-staging in verse that appropriated many bodies, lives, and identities" (184). Strikingly, despite the obvious performativity of the identity, women authors were scrutinized for details of their personal lives, especially when their verse explicitly addressed politics, class, sexuality, and race.3 As critics, biographers, and illustrators pressed close to the "poetess," she often turned to the engraved or painted portrait, a visual "commodity" that projected the sitter's domestic or womanly virtues and generated book sales (Shires 200). Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal emerged as public figures within the familial and fraternal milieu of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, whose foundational member Dante Gabriel Rossetti (DGR hereafter) was instrumental in helping the two women develop poetess personae unique from their contemporaries. I argue that in DGR's 1852 watercolour Giotto Painting the Portrait of Dante (fig. 1), the likenesses of Christina and Siddal appear in the guise of the poetess as a learned saint. However, instead of viewing this guise solely as a product of DGR's early Italian aesthetic, I interpret it in connection to both portrait drawings and sketches by DGR and Siddal, [End Page 170] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Giotto Painting the Portrait of Dante, 1852, watercolour. Courtesy of The Rossetti Archive, http://www.rossettiarchive.org/zoom/s54.img.html. as well as to Christina's representation of a female literary community in Maude (1848–50). In short, Christina's and Siddal's poetess-portraits were not only produced collaboratively but also offered a religious counterpart to the secular version that dominated English literary culture in the early 1850s. Giotto Painting the Portrait of Dante represents an apocryphal story out of the life of Dante Alighieri: the mythic occasion of the Florentine artist Giotto painting his fresco portrait.4 DGR elaborates on the story by depicting Dante's friend, the poet Guido Cavalcanti, holding an open book by another trecento poet, Guido Guinicelli. DGR also includes Giotto's teacher Cimabue, who appears on a ladder observing Giotto's handiwork. Art historian Flavia Dietrich has addressed the picture as an allegory of DGR's career and an expression of admiration for his studio model and art pupil Elizabeth Siddal. Walking with a book and a train of women, positioned beneath the scaffold where the men interact, Siddal serves as the model for Beatrice Portinari, Dante's muse and embodiment of divine Love. Although the male artists dominate the composition, the group of women is critical. While Dietrich has observed that Siddal appears in the picture, no one has noticed that Christina Rossetti is a model alongside her. DGR's inset portrait of Christina and Siddal depicts them both holding candles and Siddal a book, a symbol connected to the iconography of [End Page 171] St. Catherine of Alexandria. In Renaissance art and didactic literature, St. Catherine is frequently depicted reading a book and represents an exemplary learned woman, who was knowledgeable in classical and sacred texts, rhetorically gifted, and avowedly chaste (Ajmar 254; Tinagli 164–65). Catherine's intellectual faculties are quietly apparent in a panel from Hans Memling's St. John Altarpiece (c. 1479), known as "The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine." As the Virgin Mary places a ring upon her finger and turns the pages of a book, Catherine appears kneeling, also in the act of reading.5 Giotto Painting the Portrait of Dante includes such a scene of communal reading, as Christina Rossetti's face appears both in front of Siddal...

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