Pia de' Tolomei

The face is Jane Morris, wife of Rossetti's friend William Morris and the great obsession of his later painting. He casts her here as Pia de' Tolomei, a Sienese noblewoman from Dante's Purgatorio who, the poet hints, was shut away in a marsh fortress by her husband and left to die of the bad air. Rossetti gives her fig leaves and rosary beads to turn between her fingers, a sundial marking the slow hours, and ravens gathering behind her. He worked on the picture through the late 1860s, while his own attachment to Jane deepened. The lines from Dante describing Pia's fate are written on the frame.