L'incantesimo di Merlino

Burne-Jones worked on this through the 1870s, and the timing runs oddly close to his own life. The picture shows the wizard Merlin caught in a hawthorn tree, helpless, while the enchantress Nimue reads from the very book of spells she has coaxed out of him. He taught her his magic and she used it to trap him. For Nimue's face the painter used Maria Zambaco, a Greek sculptor and his model, with whom he had just been through a wrenching affair that nearly wrecked his marriage. The whole scene is airless and tightly laced with blossom, Merlin's eyes already glazing over as the trap closes. A Liverpool shipowner named Frederick Leyland had commissioned it, but a first attempt failed on bad materials, so the painting was not shown until 1877, at the opening of London's new Grosvenor Gallery.