L'amante di Fazio

Around 1860 Rossetti changed course. He had made his name on crowded medieval scenes, and now he began painting single women close up, half length, the frame filled with hair and throat and jewellery. This is one of the earliest of them. He took the title from a medieval Italian love poem by Fazio degli Uberti, praising his lady's golden hair and hands, a poem Rossetti had translated years before, and he set his model braiding her loose red hair at a mirror. The model was Fanny Cornforth, who kept house for him and sat often. He returned to the picture ten years later and reworked most of it, though he left her face alone, and by then he had decided the old literary title no longer fit and called it simply Aurelia.