SOURCE: Thornton, Kelsey. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Moment of the Picture.” Victorian Newsletter no. 63 (spring 1983): 1-3.

In the following essay, Thornton investigates the relationship between Rossetti's art and poetry.

To talk about the relationship of Rossetti's poetry to painting is not to relate particular poems to particular paintings. This of course can be done. In William Michael's edition of his brother's work, there is a section of poems on pictures, and a section of sonnets and verses for Rossetti's own paintings. The first group—of sonnets for pictures—includes poems on works by Leonardo, Giorgione, Mantegna, Ingres, Memmlinck, Burne-Jones, Michelangelo and Botticelli (a characteristically 1870s list). The type can be illustrated with the sonnet on Leonardo's “Our Lady of the Rocks.” Although it describes a picture, Rossetti is interested in the emotion aroused by the picture rather than its pictorial detail, and his twin themes of Life and...