Bocca Baciata was painted in 1859 in a year which marked a turning point in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s artistic style. Rossetti had previously been concerned with chivalric themes and illustrative literary paintings, but in the late 1850’s, he returned to the medium of oil to paint wholly different subjects. These directly impacted the viewer’s senses and were high in pictorial qualities.[1] Contemporaries noted it was the fleshy nature of Bocca Baciata which marked this significant shift; he no longer represented narratives crowded with incident, but single figure paintings of sensuous women.[2] He created a new type of female beauty.[3]
The title of the work, Bocca Baciata (the lips that have been kissed) was taken from a 14th Century tale told in the Decameron, by Italian writer Giovanna Boccaccio; an erotic Eastern woman makes love to eight men before her marriage to the ninth, as a virgin. Inscribed on the back of the panel is the line from the sonnet:
‘Bocca Baciata no perde ventura, anzi rinnova come fa la.’[4]
When translated, Rossetti’s choice of title becomes clear; the mouth that has been kissed does not lose its savour, indeed it renews itself just as the moon does.[5] The lips are thus isolated in the painting and the single figure is eroticised.
The canvas is dominated by the figure of Fanny Cornforth, Rossetti’s mistress and a woman with generous habits. The woman displays a feeling of melancholy and there is no allusion to reality in the material. The girl sits alone, displaying no point of reference to the world other than that of the viewer.[6] The figure is trapped in an enclosed space and her body leans against a parapet which creates a barrier between the spectator and figure; the only visual details that are accessible are her head, neck, shoulders and hands.[7]
Her bodice is unbuttoned and her flesh is on show. Her features are coarse, especially shown in her extraordinary thick elongated neck and her full face. Her wavy hair is long and luxuriant; she is portrayed as a full-mouthed, open-eyed seductress.[8] Her ruby mouth functions as a sign of sexuality and displaces visual knowledge of female genitals.[9] Rossetti is therefore constructing the fantasy of a woman by focusing on her lips, hair and neck. This is shown in the sensuous application of paint which is applied to the flowing hair and velvet robes.[10]
The background is filled with a decorative trellis, wallpaper and flowers, making any indication of setting difficult.[11] The painting is full of symbolic references; the rose in her hair is the traditional symbol for love and the marigold, which is the main motif in the background and held in the subject’s hand, is the symbol for grief. Critic, F.G Stephens believes the emblem of the marigold could suggest the woman is a poignantly youthful widow.[12] The apple on the ledge has also received much critical attention; could it be that from the Garden of Eden, symbolising sexual temptation or did Rossetti paint this as a visual analogue of the woman’s breast, which is hidden behind her bodice.[13]
Bocca Baciata functioned at the time as a sexual image, which stimulated sexual desire and assumed an erotic position for both its viewer and purchaser. William Holman Hunt (1860) criticised the image for being a gross sensuality of a revolting kind as he was concerned with the limits of acceptable visual pleasure;[14] Bocca Baciata deployed a visual realm in serve of sexual fantasy, one dependent explicitly on sight.[15] However, others at the time were enchanted by the fleshly woman. Arthur Hughes noted how he couldn’t wait to kiss the dear thing’s lips, further suggesting the erotic position the image held.[16]
Rossetti had a breakthrough with Bocca Baciata and his new style in rapid flesh painting led to many other bust-length studies of women.[17] Painted a year after Bocca Baciata in 1860, Regina Cordium (figure 2) demonstrates similar characteristics. The woman’s head and shoulders are tightly pinned to the surface of a decorative plane and her hair is lose; a suggestive sign of allowed disorder and much like the figure in Bocca Baciata, a conventional sign of her sexuality.[18] This takes us to such the conclusion that Rossetti’s single figure paintings of sensuous women achieve a timelessness, which not only implies the immortality of the artefact, but the eternal sensuous fulfilment of the woman represented.[19]
– Louise Jones
[1] David G. Riede, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Limits of Victorian Vision (Cornell University Press, 1983), 233
[2] Griselda Pollock, ‘Woman as Sign: Psychoanalytic Readings Are Rossetti’s Paintings Meaningless?’, Vision and Difference (London: Routledge, 1988), 177
[3] Oscar Wilde. ‘The Decay of Lying,’ in The Artist as Critic: Critical writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellman, (New York: Random House, 1970) 307
[4] Elizabeth Prettejohn, After the Pre Raphaelites (Manchester University Press, 1999) 22
[5] Elizabeth Prettejohn, Rossetti and his circle (Tate Gallery Publishing: London, 1997) 14
[6] John Nicoll, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Macmillan publishers: New York, 1975) 125
[7] Pollock, Vision and Difference, 177
[8] Riede, Victorian Vision, 237-238
[9] Pollock, Vision and Difference,178
[10] Prettejohn, Rossetti circle, 14
[11] Pollock, Vision and Difference, 178
[12] Prettejohn, Rossetti circle, 15
[13] Prettejohn, Rossetti circle, 14
[14] Pollock, Vision and Difference, 179
[15] Pollock, Vision and Difference,181
[16] Nicoll, Rossetti, 125
[17] Prettejohn, After the Pre Raphaelites, 21
[18] Pollock, Vision and Difference, 184
[19] Pollock, Vision and Difference, 167
Victorian Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 