로마의 과부

Rossetti painted this in 1874, and grief was not an abstract subject for him. His own wife, Elizabeth Siddal, had died of a laudanum overdose in 1862, and he had famously buried his only manuscript of poems in her coffin, then had them dug up years later. Here a young Roman widow sits in a tomb beside the urn holding her husband's ashes, her bridal sash still wound around it, playing a quiet air on two small harps. Pink roses, the flower of Venus, twine through the strings. The Latin words on the urn, Dis Manibus, were standard on Roman graves and mean roughly 'to the spirits of the dead'. The model was Alexa Wilding, a dressmaker he had stopped one evening on a London street.