Sancta Lilias

This head began as the top of something much larger. In September 1873 Rossetti started a full version of The Blessed Damozel, his painting of a dead girl leaning out from the gold bar of heaven, still longing for the lover she left on earth. He worked up the face, then lost faith in the canvas, cut it down to this single figure, and set the fragment aside. The subject came from a poem he had written as a very young man, decades before he took up the brush for it. She wears the lilies and the star of the finished picture, and her name here, Sancta Lilias, holy lily, points to a purity the longing verses complicate. Rossetti dated the surviving piece 1874.