Helena von Troja

In the early 1860s Dante Gabriel Rossetti mostly stopped telling stories and started painting faces, half-length women pushed right up to the picture surface, beautiful and a little dangerous. Helen of Troy is one of them. His model was Annie Miller, a Chelsea woman several of the Pre-Raphaelites were entangled with. Around Helen's neck hangs a pendant shaped like a burning torch, and she touches it, a private sign for Paris, the lover whose abduction of her lit the ten-year war. Behind her, small, Troy is already on fire. Rossetti even lettered a line from the Greek of Aeschylus into the background, naming her the destroyer of ships and men and cities. She meets your eye perfectly calm through all of it, one finger resting on the little burning torch at her throat.