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Phyllis Weliver
Suffolk University, Boston and
Suzanne Fagence-Cooper
Victoria and Albert Museum

A 'rapturous undersong': music in D.G.Rossetti's pictures and The House of Life poems

'Colour & metre, these are the true patents of nobility in painting & poetry, taking precedence of all intellectual claims' - D.G. Rossetti

Musical images are a recurrent theme in the painting and poetry of D.G.Rossetti, as he played with the conventions of musical references to add a new dimension to his art. This paper will place Rossetti's use of music within the context of the Aesthetic movement. By looking first at Rossetti's visual art, and then at the poetry, this paper will demonstrate how music was used to explore sensuality and physicality.

Music is bound up with the shift in Rossetti's paintings from a clear-cut, narrative, Florentine approach to a sensual, Venetian style, where colour is paramount. Musical imagery also demonstrates the interweaving of the arts, which was a key development in Aestheticism.

In the same way that Pater later idealizes art as aspiring to the condition of music, in The House of Life, Rossetti begins to obliterate the distinction between matter and form; we hear a concrete voice emerge through metre. This is equated to 'song' in the poems, and it creates a unity in art similar to the speaker's aspired unity of soul and body, of himself and his lover, and finally of his own personality.