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  • Mastering the Ineffable:Dante Gabriel Rossetti's “The Vase of Life” and the Kantian Sublime
  • Carolyn F. Austin (bio)

Any reader of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's ekphrastic poems (that is, poems that take a work of art as their object) must be struck by the ineffability he attributes to paintings or the subjects they represent. Leonardo da Vinci's Our Lady of the Rocks deals with "things occult"; Andrea Mantenga's Allegorical Dance of Women is full of the "secret of the wells of Life," which the heart knows but the mind can know nothing of. These visual scenes are "mysteries," a word Rossetti uses to open three of his ekphrastic poems.1 They cannot be known intellectually, cannot be solved. Their meaning can only be vaguely intuited but cannot be expressed. Rossetti seems to be positing himself as a votive at Art's altar, a humble supplicant whose understanding cannot comprehend the goddess he serves, but whose heart holds some intuition of her meaning.

But is such humbleness genuine, or is this insistence on the radical distance between art and the observer actually a way of asserting a more subtle mastery on the part of the observer, the poet, over the visual arts? I will argue that Rossetti's insistence on the mystery of the visual arts fits into a long transcendental and Romantic tendency to see in the ineffable not so much a failure of mastery as an eventual triumph of the observer who can conceptualize the ineffable, even as he (a pronoun I use intentionally here) cannot fully comprehend or sense it. The mystery which Rossetti attributes to the visual arts has its roots in concepts like Kant's mathematical sublime, in which the viewer of the infinite is sensorially overwhelmed by the expanse but triumphs in his very ability to conceptualize infinity.

To claim that Rossetti continues to work within a tradition of radical difference between verbal and visual media is to run counter to many of Rossetti critics who see him—chiefly because of his use of both poetry and painting in composite works—as part of the ut pictura poesis tradition.2 Walter Pater's essay on Rossetti in Appreciations—a starting place for much further criticism—begins by asserting both the importance of Rossetti's simultaneous [End Page 159] careers as a painter and poet and the equal illumination that one aspect of Rossetti's work could throw on the other. In fact, Pater couches his praise for Rossetti's poetry within a painterly simile: Rossetti's "gift of transparency in language—the control of a style which did but obediently shift and shape itself to the mental motion" is like "a well-trained hand" which "follow[s] on the tracing-paper the outline of an original drawing below it."3 Pater himself indulges in a simile that at its foundation celebrates the similarities of the arts. Later critics will be more explicit in their assertion that Rossetti peacefully unites the arts. Maryan Ainsworth, for example, refers to Rossetti's composite works first as "a marriage, or liaison, between poem and picture" and then as a "symbiosis," moving from a meeting of equals to a complete intertwining of the arts.4 Other critics use the rhetoric of "the sister arts," making poetry and painting into siblings that are drawn even closer together by their shared gender. Susan Beegel claims that Rossetti makes "the sister arts of poetry and painting equal partners in the business of illustration,"5 and Eben Bass asserts that Rossetti's works and that of all the Pre-Raphaelites "ignore the classical barrier erected by Lessing between the sister arts."6

These critics are not without the justification of Rossetti's own assertion about the near-identity of painting and poetry. In a series of aphorisms that William Rossetti collected under "Sentences and Notes" in the 1911 Works, Rossetti writes that "picture and poem bear the same relation to each other as beauty does in man and woman: the point of meeting where the two are most identical is the supreme perfection" (p. 606). The arts should, according to this formulation, be more similar than different. Andrew Leng reads this...

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