Dante Alighieri's Siddal Analysis

In 1849, the painter and later author Dante Rossetti met a woman by the name of Elizabeth (or ‘Lizzie’) Siddal, who sat as a model for artists of the Pre-Raphaelite period. She at the time modelled for Walter Deverell, and Rossetti became fascinated by her beauty. Only two years later in 1851 Rossetti had her as a model, which progressed to the point of her being his sole model and inspiration and him forbidding her from modelling for other painters. He often used her likeness for paintings of various idealized women, such as Dante Alighieri's Beatrice, who was based on a woman of the same name and was present in the last part of Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. Rossetti very much put Siddal on a pedestal, seeing her as an artistic muse rather than as a person, which was duly noted by his family once he introduced her to them. In …show more content…
His depression prevented him from painting so he instead wrote poetry. Due in part to his addiction, Rossetti developed something of an obsession with retrieving the manuscript that was interred with his wife. With the help of his agent, a man by the name of Charles Howell, and local authorities, the grave was exhumed and the journal retrieved. Rossetti was, as would be expected, not present at the ceremony- which occurred in the middle of the night so as to steer clear of rousing public curiosity and starting rumors- but it was said that Siddal’s corpse was exceptionally unmarred by decay, presumably because of the preservative effects of laudanum. The exhumation was for little purpose, however, as a worm had found its way into the coffin and eaten away at the pages of the journal so that the majority of the poems bordered on illegibility. As such, Rossetti was forced to rewrite many of the unfinished works in whole or in part, eventually publishing them in a book simply titled Poems in 1870, some eight years subsequent to Siddal’s