La escalera dorada

When Burne-Jones showed this at London's Grosvenor Gallery in 1880, the gallery was the height of the Aesthetic Movement, the circle that held art need not tell a story or teach a lesson. And this picture tells none. Down a winding stair come 18 young women in pale robes carrying musical instruments, yet not one of them is playing. Nobody has ever agreed what they are doing, or where they are going. That was the point. The critic Walter Pater had lately written that all art aspires to the condition of music, and Burne-Jones seems to be after exactly that, a mood rather than a meaning. Several of the faces were friends and family, among them his own daughter Margaret and William Morris's daughter May.