La Donna della Fiamma

Rossetti drew this in pastel in 1870, the year he published a book of poems he had buried years earlier in his wife's coffin and then had dug up again. His wife Elizabeth Siddal was by then dead, and his model and his obsession had become Jane Morris, the wife of his close friend William Morris. Here Jane holds a small winged spirit of flame, an image Rossetti borrowed from Dante, who used it for Beatrice, the ideal woman he loved from afar. He had once saved that Dante imagery for Siddal. Now he gives it to Jane, the living woman he could not stop drawing. The orange robe and the flame carry almost all the warm color in a picture that is otherwise cool and still.