Una visione di Fiammetta

By 1878 Rossetti was ailing and reclusive, but still returning to the Italian poets he had loved since boyhood. This picture grows out of a sonnet by Boccaccio about the last time the poet saw Fiammetta, the name he gave the woman he adored. Rossetti had the sonnet, his own English translation of it, and a poem of his own all inscribed on the frame, so the painting and the words work as a single piece. Fiammetta stands among spring blossom with a bird overhead and a haze of red behind her, a beauty glimpsed just before it is lost. The model was Marie Spartali Stillman, herself a painter, who had taken up the same subject before he did. It was among the last major oils Rossetti finished before his death four years later.