"The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, founded in 1848, lasted only five years, but its style was absorbed by late nineteenth-century art and design across the continent. Inspired by Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelists sought to recover medieval simplicity and purity lost in the pagan luxery of High Renaissance art, typified, they oddly felt, by Raphael. Unlike their Decadent descendants, they professed collective social values. The only member of the Brotherhood whom I identify as already Decadent is Rossetti, whose Italian blood would out. But in all Pre-Raphaelite painting there is an unsettling tension between form and moral content.
Pre-Raphaelite painting begins with Keatsian ardor for the minutiae of organic nature. But instead of High Romance energy or dynamic process, we get Late Romantic stasis.
Pre-Raphaelite art, like Mannerism, disturbingly avoids pictoral focus. Our eye is not automatically guided to the human figures but is forced to wander over the microscopic detail. Color is unshaded and applied in separate cells, as in Byzantine mosaic or Gautier's gorgeous color units. Flowers and blades of grass are brilliantly lapidary, the paint surface so richly worked that there is only a single step from Pre-Raphaelite naturism to Gustave Moreau's Decadent jewelled artifice. Everything in Pre-Raphaelite painting is seen too clearly. The eye is invited but coerced. Part triumphs over whole, exerting an uncomfortable pressure on the viewer. Landscape has an unnatural stillness, making it a Decadent frozen tableau. Sunlit panoramas are locked in Decadent closure, a Spenserian embowerment. Pre-Raphaelite painting deadens even as it celebrates. Persons and things are candied, mummified, miniaturized.
The Pre-Raphaelites revived Blake, who had died unknown. Swinburn promoted Blake's demonic poetry, and Rossetti promoted his art. In 1847 Rossetti bought the notebook where Blake attacks chiaroscuro and praises "the hard and wirey line of rectitude", that Apollonian contour I traced from Egypt and Greece to Botticelli and Spenser. Ruskin too condemns Renaissance chiaroscuro. So Pre-Raphaelite sharpness of detail is polemically Apollonian. Pre-Raphaelite mummification is Apollonian objectification and fixation, which Rossetti makes his master principle of sexual personae. Rossetti, unlike the others, had trouble painting landscape from nature and sometimes had to recreate it imaginatively from the Decadent ritual solitude of a blackvelvet-draped chamber.
As his career progressed or, some said, degenerated, Rossetti's paintings obsessively returned to a single subject, a woman of somnambulistic langour. The Rossetti woman rebels against Victorian convention, her unpinned hair and unstructured medieval gown flowing with lyrical freedom. The heavy head swaps on a serpentine neck. Her long thick hair is The Belle Dame Sans Merci's net of entrapment. Her swollen lips are to become a universal motif of Decadent art, thanks to Burne-Jones and Beardsley. The Rossetti vampire mouth cannot speak, but is has a life of its own. It is gorged with the blood of victims. Like Blake's sick rose, the Rossetti woman is blanketed in silence and humid, private pleasure.
Rossetti ritually commemorated the face of Elizabeth Siddal, a melancholic comsumptive who died of a laudanum ovedose shortly after he married her. Seven years later, he exhumed her corpse to rescue the sheaf of poems that, in a Romantic fit, he had buried with her. He constantly drew and painted Siddal before and after her death. His friend Ford Madox Brown wrote in a diary, "it is like a monomania with him." Rossetti's brother said John Everest Millais' Ophelia (1852) was the most faithful likeness of Siddal. Guess what! Siddal herself didn't look in the least like a Rossetti painting! It is as if the artist were in bondage to Poe's Ligeia, whose image vanquishes all living women. Like Leonardo, Rossetti was under enchantment by some archetypal original, probably a Romantic shadow of the mother. William Holman Hunt said of his treatment of later models: "Rossetti's tendency in sketching a face was to convert the features of his sitter to his favourite ideal type, and if he finished on these lines, the drawing was extremely charming, even if you had to make-believe a good deal to see the likeness, while if the sitter's features would not lend themselves to the pre-ordained form, he went through a stage of reluctant twisting of lines and quantities to make the drawing satisfactory." Obsession is psychic closure, a Decadent deforming of reality. What in Siddal evoked Rossetti's fanatical devotion? Her frailty seemed feminine to others. Rossetti saw, as his namesake Dante did in Beatrice, the hermaphrodite remoteness of the beautiful boy, the cruel perfection of solipsistic beauty. From the brooding girl-boy Elizabet Siddal came the definitive sexual persona of all Decadent art.
Italian Catholicism's vestigal paganism resurfaces in Rossetti through the impact on him of High Romantic poetry. His painting begins to drift from the Pre-Raphaelite Middle Ages toward the pagan past, a Romantic regression. Simons sees the sinister transformation of Rosetti's women into "idols": Venus grows "more and more Asiatic"; his dreams are "lunar, spectral, a dark and unintelligible menace." Moving back toward Cybele, Rossetti daemonizes the medieval veneration of women and changes English Romaticism from High to Late. He and Swinburne agree about female omnipotence. The sleepy vampires of his late paintings are chillingly oblivious to the masculine, upon which they have already fed. Rossetti gradually fleshes out skinny Elizabeth Siddal with post-Raphaelite Baroque massiness. He compensates for Romanticism's lack of sculpture by giving his female personae a sculptural density, expressing the hidden oppressions in Pre-Raphaelite nature. The most blatant of his objets de culte is Astarte Syriaca (1877). The somber goddess and the two vamping angels all have the same face, a combination of Siddal with Jane Morris, who according to photographs had a mannish hardness. Chiaroscuro, banished from early Pre-Raphaelitism, has returned to cloud heart and mind.
Rossetti and his diciple Burne-Jones practice allegorical repletion, my term for Leonardo's the Virgin and Child with St. Anne. Doubled female faces always signify an incestuous collapsing of identities, a chtonian undertow. In The Bower Meadow, which I think is Rossetti's version of Botticelli's imprisoned Primavera, the same woman appears in an uncanny quadruplicate, changing only hair color and style, like a molting bird. The four women sing and dance with averted faces. Emotionally disconnected, they float down crossing planes of vision into distant space.
Van den Berg says the nineteenth-century self came apart or "pluralized". In Astarte Syriaca and The Bower Meadow, psyche fragments into female plurals, the masochistic self-haunting of a Romantic sister-spirit. These alienated twins exert their ominous power across a dead space of Late Romantic materiality. Rossetti repeats the same face thrice in Rosa Triplex and La Ghirlandata. Is she Blake's witchy threefold maiden? In The Blessed Damozel, one face appears at different ages. Spooked lovers stare at their doubles in How They Met Themselves. Rossetti dramatizes the too-muchness of Romantic identity. He names the Spenserian arena of Romantic crisis: nature as a bower meadow, both open and closed, eternal threshing floor of
birth and death.
Burne-Jones inherited Rossetti's perversities. Martin Harrison and Bill Waters trace the hermaphroditism in Burne-Jones's painting to Swinburne and Simeon Solomon: "This ambiguous interpretation of the sexes is not present in any form in the art of Rossetti." But all of Rossetti's women are hermaphrodites. Take Beata Beatrix (1863), where dead Elizabeth Siddal, a clairvoyant Beatrice, prays to the divinized version of herself with closed eyes. She is like Shelley's android Hermaphrodite, murmuring and smiling to itself with sealed eyes. As I said of Nefertiti, impersonality or emotional lifelessness in a woman is an masculinizing abstraction. Siddal's Decadent androgyny resides in her solipsistic self-embowerment, her eeri aura. Decadence is about dead ends. The one medievalism Rossetti retains in his late period is Dante's grandiose cultism of dead Beatrice. In the sexual hierarchy of the Vita Nuova, Dante subordinates himself to a cooly narcissistic female adolescent, who I bet no one else in Florence thought was anything special. The latent sadomasochism in this becomes overt in Rossetti, of whom Burne-Jones said: "Gabriel was half a woman." Western artists ritualize sex, because Western art ritualizes nature.
Burne-Jones subtly corrupts Pre-Raphaelite medievalism with Italian Renaissance style, specifically Mantegna's Donatello-derived Apollonian hardness. All his personae, male and female, have Elizabeth Siddal's face. He is invaded and saturated by Rossetti's monomania. Burne-Jones' pensive Sir Galahad (ca. 1857), for example, is obviously Siddal as equestrian knight. Victorious St. George is so feminine one may mistake him for Joan of Arc. In Perseus and the Graiae (1892), the girlish hero is less masculine than the archetypal woman he boldly deceives. The youth of Pygmalion has the same face as the girl of Danaë. The two lovers of Cupid and Psyche are mirror-images. Octave Mirbeau said of Burne-Jones' faces: "The rings under the eyes ... are unique in the whole history of art; it is impossible to tell whether they are the results of masturbation, lesbianism, normal love-making or tuberculosis." These harrowing black eyes come from the sickly Siddal. Cosmetically applied to the great heroes of western saga, they drain masculine motivation and action at their source. Burne-Jones' knights are obsessed insomniacs watching over the decline of culture.
Burne-Jones' transsexual world is populated by one incestuously self-propagating being. We are in another Late Romantic bower, shadowless under a grey sky. The ritual limitation on his sexual personae is a Decadent closure, denying our eye right of access to other human types. The Golden Stairs (1880) expands Rossetti's triplets and quadruplets. We drown in a shower of identical women, eighteen in all, cloning themselves and assaulting the eye. Beauty in excess makes Decadent dyspepsia. The sadomasochistic tableau of The Wheel of Fortune multiplies the male. Giant Fortuna turns her torture wheel, chaining a row of beautiful young men, male odalisques in Michelangelo's troubled late style. Each seems languid twin of the next, limbs stretched in sensual suffering.
Burne-Jones' embowered nature begat Art Nouveau, which flourished from the 1880s to World War I. Then modern machine culture geometrized Art Nouveau's organic patterns into Art Deco. So Spenser's dynasty, extending through High and Late Romanticism, unexpectedly ends in the Chrysler Building and Radio City Music Hall. Burne-Jones' serpentine line comes from Blake, whose rapacious flamelike flowers reveal the covert sexual meaning of Art Nouveau's arabesques. The copious histories of Art Nouveau lack psychological insight. Twenty years ago, I was struck by Art Nouveau's popularity among male homosexual aesthetes, for whom neither it nor Beardsley had to be revived, since they had never been forgotten. In every star, style, or art work celebrated by these Alexandrine homsexuals, there is always a secret hermaphroditism. So with Art Nouveau, the most epicene style since Mannerism.
Art Nouveau, unlike Islamic patterns, is not value-neutral. But then, nothing in art is value-neutral. Style is always a shadowy emanation of assumptions about nature and society. Art Nouveau subliminally expresses the Decadent world-view. Rooms or buildings undulate with curvy rythms, sexual subversions of western will, which since Egypt has based its monoments on the stable, foursquare directionals of the male chest. Mainline western architecture has a rational organization unshared by Hindu temples, with their mazelike warrens and swarming surfaces. Gaudí's Art Nouveau rooms and caves are archaic with female swellings. Art Nouveau is active but sterile. The leaves and vines slithering up gates, grills, lamps, panes, and bookbindings are a garden of moral darkness, a jungle reclaiming the works of men. Like Huysman's A Rebours, Art Nouveau shows nature at her stupidest and most unspiritual, a primeval tangle of insinuating plant-motion. Art Nouveau is growth without fruitfulness. Keatsian plumpness withers and contracts. Art Nouveau is a harvest of spines and thorns. It shows the modern city as a Sodom in black flames. It shows nature as cold biology writhing in final spasms. Art Nouveau combines the primitive with the sophisticated, a decadent technique invented by Hellenistic art and turned into cruel fun and games by the Roman emperors.
Critiques disparage Burne-Jones's painting as too "mannered". But this is the elegant self-consciousness of Mannerism. Even Whistler's suave Japanese interiors have a Mannerist linearity; his clean, uncluttered line carries an anatomical message. House and body have been in analogy since the birth of architecture. The stout, bosomy Victorian grande dame is an upholstered sofa. The tall, flat-chested Pre-Raphaelite New Woman, typified by bisexual Sarah Bernhardt, is a bony Mackintosh chair: tea and sympathy on a Scottish torture rack. Mannerist Art Nouveau denies female mass and internality. Its iron spirals of flashfrozen vegetation nullify nature's fecund liquidity. Its whiplash, a sadomasochistic trope, stings the eye. Art Nouveau combats the chthonian, mimicking in order to petrify it in art. Art Nouveau is a late Romantic Apollonian style, turning nature's perpetual motion to perceptual stasis.
Burne-Jones, the progenitor of Art Nouveau, shows the Medusahead of nature in all its suffocating disorder. The pretty knights of the Briar Wood sprawl comatose outside Sleeping Beauty's castle. Scattered armour lies twisted in a bramble thicket of stunning density, Botticelli's prison-bar pines restored to medieval tapestry. We see the thriumph of mother nature over the masculine. In the The Doom Fulfilled Burne-Jones' greatest painting, Perseus is Laocoön in the grip of coiling nature. The design recalls the illuminated letters of the Book of Kells, because Romanticism is the sacred text of nature-cult. Perseus is thrust into the hungry maw of a Blakean flower. The picture proves that Art Nouveau's running vines are an abstract version of daemonic nature, come to aggressive life to trap and strangle the human. The organic is invincible metallic, while Perseus wears a visionary armour of leafy vegetation. A Greek hero becomes Spenser's weedy knight Artegall, who keeps relapsing into nature. So we must ask of Burne-Jones' picture: has the touch of the chthonian serpent contaminated Perseus? Is nature one instant from turning the male back into herself? Legend says Perseus wins. But the painting depicts the archetypal moment of doubt in which we are all caught in our daily battle with nature.
Other Pre-Raphaelites were less interested in problems of sex and nature. Holman Hunt illustrates a necrophilic Keats poem in Isabella and the Pot of Basil (1867), where a mourning maiden waters her lover's severed head with her tears. William Morris adapts Elizabeth Siddal's face, swollen lips, and flowering hair for The Archangel Gabriel (1862). Simeon Solomon recasts her for Until the Day Breaks (1869), whose ivory-fleshed, androgynous brother and sister anticipate Jean Cocteau's homoerotic ephebes. Ther dreamy, incestuos intimacy is learnedly reproduced in the entranced sailor twins embracing in Madonna's superb peep-show video, "Open Your Heart" (1986), which confirms many of my ideas about the symbiosis of art and pornography."
Excerpt from Sexual Personae : Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. Yale University Press 1990. (Pp. 490-498)
