Bocca Baciata

In the summer of 1859 Rossetti had spent a decade painting earnest medieval subjects, and then he did something abrupt. A friend, the architect George Boyce, commissioned a single head, and Rossetti gave him a woman filling the whole panel, her hair loose, marigolds crowding the foreground, nothing to explain and no story to read. He borrowed the title from a line of Boccaccio, printed on the back of the frame, about a mouth that loses nothing by being kissed and renews itself like the moon. The model was Fanny Cornforth, his companion of those years. Painters who saw it noticed the change at once, the flat gold jewellery, the closeness of the flesh, the sheer surface pleasure, and later writers treated the little picture as the start of Rossetti's turn toward beauty as its own subject. It went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1980. The apple resting at her elbow is the one clear sign the picture wants you to think of Eve.