Sibylla Palmifera

Rossetti painted this over several years from 1866, and meant it as one half of a pair. Against it he set an earlier picture of a very different woman, giving both paintings sonnets and matching titles: this one he called Soul's Beauty, the other Body's Beauty. The calm figure here, holding a palm branch in a shadowy temple, stands for beauty of the spirit. Around her Rossetti packed his symbols, a blindfolded Cupid with roses for love, a skull among poppies for death, a sphinx for mystery. The model was Alexa Wilding, a young woman he had stopped in a London street and asked to sit, who posed for many of his late pictures for a weekly wage.