塞壬利盖亚

Rossetti made this in chalk in 1873, the year after a breakdown and a suicide attempt had nearly ended him. He was working slowly now, often from his own invented stories rather than the world outside. The siren here comes from a libretto he had written a few years earlier, The Doom of the Sirens, in which a figure named Ligeia is one of the leads. Rather than the deadly temptress of Homer, he shows her calm and far off, an instrument in her hands, the sailors she would lure barely present behind her. The face is Alexa Wilding, a model he drew again and again in these years. He thought highly of the sheet, calling it, though only chalk, one of his best things.