Veronica Veronese

Rossetti gave this picture an invented Italian name and a made-up backstory in French, as if it copied an old Venetian portrait that never existed. The model was Alexa Wilding, one of the faces he painted again and again, and the heavy green velvet she wears was a real dress, lent for the sitting by Jane Morris. The woman pauses with her fingers on a violin's strings while a caged canary sings behind her, and Rossetti meant the whole thing as a picture of the artist's soul at the moment a work first comes to it. He painted it in 1872 for Frederick Leyland, a Liverpool shipowner who was buying up his pictures.