Bocca Baciata

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Bocca Baciata (1859) is a painting by Dante Gabriel

Rossetti which represents a turning point in his career. It was Bocca Baciata
the first of his pictures of single female figures, and
established the style that was later to become a signature of
his work. The model was Fanny Cornforth, the principal
inspiration for Rossetti's sensuous figures.

The title, meaning "mouth that has been kissed", refers to the
sexual experience of the subject and is taken from the Italian
proverb written on the back of the painting:[1]

Bocca baciata non perde ventura, anzi rinnova

come fa la luna.
The mouth that has been kissed does not lose its
savour,
indeed it renews itself just as the moon does.

Artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Rossetti, an accomplished translator of early Italian
Year 1859
literature,[2] probably knew the proverb from Boccaccios
Decameron where it is used as the culmination of the tale of Medium Oil on canvas
Alatiel: a beautiful Saracen princess who, despite having had Location Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston
sex on perhaps ten thousand occasions with eight separate
lovers in the space of four years, successfully presents herself to the King of the Algarve as his virgin bride.[3]

Rossetti explained in a letter to William Bell Scott that he was attempting to paint flesh more fully, and to
"avoid what I know to be a besetting fault of mine - & indeed rather common to PR painting - that of stipple in
the flesh...Even among the old good painters, their portraits and simpler pictures are almost always their
masterpieces for colour and execution; and I fancy if one kept this in view, one might have a better chance of
learning to paint at last."[4]

The painting may have been influenced by Millais' portrait of his sister-in-law Sophie Gray, completed two
years earlier.[5]

Notes
1. Rossetti Archive, Bocca Baciata(http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/s114.rap.html)
2. Giovanni Boccaccio,Decameron, tr. by Cormac Cuilleanin and John Payne (W are, Herts: Wordsworth Editions,
2004), p. lix (https://books.google.com/books?id=bdKhjsvJgk8C&pg=PR59) .
3. Decameron, II.7.
4. Treuherz, J, Prettejohn, E, Becker, E, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, National Museums Liverpool. p 56.
5. Tate Gallery, Millais, 2007, p.134

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Categories: Paintings by Dante Gabriel Rossetti 1859 paintings Paintings in Boston

This page was last edited on 5 November 2016, at 20:28.

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