The Blessed Damozel 1878

Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted The Blessed Damozel in oils and tempera on a wood panel, with the work completed sometime before 1880. Rossetti was associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an artistic group formed in Britain in 1848. The Brotherhood sought to challenge the Royal Academy’s promotion of a narrow set of artistic values and the grand history paintings that they favoured. Instead they looked to earlier art, before the High Renaissance, and they valued the sincerity of feeling and intensity of detail found in art from the Medieval period. They were interested in the symbolic possibilities of colour, the emotive potential of stylized figures, and the fusion of poetry and painting. Rossetti’s painting offers an other-worldly scene with his stylized figures and the symbolic lilies, stars, and roses. Art historians often make use of literary sources to understand paintings like this one more fully. In this case Rossetti's own poem, written decades earlier, helps us to understand his vision of heaven.