It is perhaps not surprising given the melancholic history we've glimpsed that D. G. Rossetti's work is peopled by many embodiments of the shade. Both paintings and poems are haunted by personae that inhabit unearthly realms. Those female figures we have previously encountered remain throughout his work but acquire a degree of persistence in the later period. Beata Beatrix (1864) is an important painting for crystallizing various strands of Rossetti's aesthetic and for impressing the means by which in Pre-Raphaelitism more generally the literary, artistic and the personal become thoroughly entwined. A painting that tends to be thought of chiefly as a portrait of Elizabeth Siddal, a tribute after her death, was conceived as a painting about Dante, Beatrice and the figure of Love, as we've seen so central to the Vita Nuova. In its completed state the ecstatic figure of Beatrice receiving the poppy dominates the composition spatially. But, in terms of colouring, the background figures of Dante, and Love, prominent in red, who holds out the flaming heart, are given equal weight and they haunt the portrait format together with the unmistakable Florentine outline of the Ponte Vecchio which bridges the Arno.

Although at one level Beata Beatrix is clearly a portrait of Siddal, it is important to locate the painting within the complex process of Rossetti's identification with Dante. In many ways, following Dante, Rossetti's incarnation of ‘Love’ himself, and his almost masochistic enslavement to that figure, holds more of a sway over his work than any individual person. In such a reading it is the power of identification, Rossetti's compulsion to identify with particular masochistic figures, that is particularly telling. Indeed, to all intents and purposes, as I've suggested, that compulsion renders as approximate self-portraits Rossetti's portraits of women. Moreover, a wish to inhabit, both in thought and in a visual context, a space between life and death as one brought about by extreme desire, is perhaps most uncompromisingly explored by Rossetti in the figure of Proserpine.

PROSERPINE

A pervasive desire for the interchangeability of art forms is indeed a driving force of later works by Swinburne, Solomon and Watts. The fascination for, or insistence upon, re-imagining a theme or a figure such as Proserpine is crucial, emerging as it does from a Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic articulated early on in The Germ.