La Donna della Finestra

The woman at the window is Jane Morris, wife of Rossetti's friend and business partner William Morris, and by 1879 the great fixation of his life. He borrowed the subject from Dante's Vita Nuova, where a lady appears at a window and looks down with pity on the poet as he grieves for the dead Beatrice. That parallel was the whole point for Rossetti. He had cast his own late wife, Elizabeth Siddal, as his Beatrice, and he let Jane stand for the living woman whose sympathy might console him. He had first drawn the scene in 1870 and kept returning to it. This finished oil, made the year before his own death, is among the last of his Dante pictures.