Mary Magdalene by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Left: Mary Magdalene, Dante G Rossetti 1877
Right: Mary Magdalene, Dante G. Rossetti, 1867

I don't feel like saying anything about these paintings. I took a glimpse and found biographical references, historic background and some other articles that say nothing about the art or analysis that speaks more about the person who is writing than the artist's aesthetics.
Lately I feel like watching without the need of words.
If I wanted words I would read Rossetti's poems.

Mary Magdalene by Rossetti and Piero di Cosimo

Mary Magdalene portrayed by two painters 377 years apart.

Dante Gabriel Rosseti illustrations of poetry

Rossetti illustrated poems and this is the frontispiece of her sister's book "Goblin Market and Other Poems" published in 1862. He also did projects for stained glasses but as soon as you look at one of his works as an illustrator, painter or in his drawings for the stained glasses the firts thing that comes to your mind is "Oh! A Rossetti." He was also a poet.

The Day Dream by Dante Gabriel Rossetti - inspired by a Tennyson poem

The Day Dream, 1880, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a painter and poet, is inspired by a Tennyson's poem The Daydream.

Rossetti not only did this painting but also wrote a sonnet that is inscribed on the frame:

"The thronged boughs of the shadowy sycamore

Still bear young leaflets half the summer through;

From when the robin 'gainst the unhidden blue

Perched dark, till now, deep in the leafy core,

The embowered throstle's urgent wood-notes soar

Through summer silence. Still the leaves come new;

Yet never rosy-sheathed as those which drew

Their spiral tongues from spring-buds heretofore.

Within the branching shade of Reverie

Dreams even may spring till autumn; yet none be

Like woman's budding day-dream spirit-fann'd.

Lo! tow'rd deep skies, not deeper than her look,

She dreams; till now on her forgotten book

Drops the forgotten blossom from her hand."

I took this pictures at Second Life in a exhibition of many artists and this is the Rossetti section. Click to enlarge to see it. At the right side there are three of Rossetti's paintings. Left, my avatar.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, poet and painter, - "The Blue Bower"

The Blue Bower

I was searching for Dante Gabriel Rossetti's images and poems and came across with the "The Rossetti Archives":

THE Rossetti Archive facilitates the scholarly study of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the painter, designer, writer, and translator who was, according to both John Ruskin and Walter Pater, the most important and original artistic force in the second half of the nineteenth century in Great Britain. In Whistler's famous comment, “He was a king”.

Here is the comment for "The Blue Bower", 1865, according to a scholar:

Introduction

"The picture is a key example of the way DGR, in the 1860s especially, incorporated into his pictures both Venetian cinquecento stylistic devices and the formal and decorative features of Japanese ukiyo-e colored prints. This highly sensuous and decorative approach to his painting first appeared in DGR's remarkable work of 1860, Bocca Baciata. The connection of that painting to the present work is underscored by the fact that the poem doubling the 1860 painting of Bocca Baciata carries the received title of “The Song of the Bower”. The highly erotic idea of “the bower” pervades all of DGR's work, both textual and pictorial.

Strongly erotic as it is, the picture is nonetheless an all but abstract colourist work, a kind of homage to the Venetian and Japanese masters whose pictures DGR was admiring. The contrast of the voluptuous floral work and jewellery with the hexagonal blue background tiles sets a compositional frame for the main drama of the picture, the play of its blues, greens, golds, and reds. The irreal, even fantastic, character of the work gets focused by the purely decorative function of the Japanese koto, which could neither be present nor played in this way or setting. Spencer-Longhurst also rightly observes the contrast DGR works out within the floral materials themselves, where the “opulence (of the passion flowers and clinging wild convolvulus) is balanced by the modest sprig of light-blue cornflowers in the foreground, playing on (Fanny Cornforth's) name” (Spencer-Longhurst, 11)."

We have to be silent after reading scholars words. I will post other works by Rossetti.