Madonna Pietra

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was named for the poet and spent his life circling him. In 1874 he took up one of Dante's harsher love poems, the sestina about a woman called Pietra, whose name simply means stone, written for a lady as cold as her name. Rossetti had translated it years before, and now drew her from his favourite model, Alexa Wilding, in coloured chalk. The idea he had jotted down was exact: she holds a crystal globe, and in it he meant a bare rocky landscape to appear, a mirror of her own pitiless heart. He never carried the subject through to a large oil. What survives is this pastel, the stony lady he had first met on the page of a medieval poem.