Lady Lilith, Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Lady Lilith

 Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Being named Flora, I have always had a taste for botany, especially the rose, the ultimate symbol of love for any romantic. Naturally, I was thrilled to throw in roses as a key theme of the talk I just gave on one my favourite painting's Lady Lilith by the Victorian poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. I thought I'd share with you the symbolism of the roses and other flowers as well as the suggestiveness behind Lilith's intriguing red hair and a couple of namesake paintings. But, first I must remind you that Rossetti was also a member of my beloved 19th c. Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood of painters whose naturalistic, dreamy, romantic paintings of ethereal beauties and nature I truly adore.  

So, back to the Lady of the moment; the story goes that Lilith was the first wife of Adam in the Garden of Eden according to Hebrew myth. Rossetti sheds more light on his choice of heroin in his letter to Thomas Hake in 1870, which said that he was painting the “ ‘Modern Lilith’ as she combs out her abundant golden hair and gazes on herself in the glass with that self-absorption by whose strange fascination such natures draw others within their own circle.” Ah, so she was a seductive woman who drew in her suitors? Perhaps this is also suggested by the foxglove flower on the bureau, which was said to signify insincerity and therefore promiscuity?

In literature Lady Lilith is frequently illustrated as a powerful temptress, which arouses the stereotype of seduction and sexuality associated with the red hair. On the frame Rossetti wrote lines from Gurta’s Faust on the frame’s label: "Beware of her fair hair/And when she twines them round a young man's neck/ she will not ever set him free again”. Rossetti's obsession with the sexuality associated with red-hair comes from his passion for Italian Renaissance art as in the flowing red hair in Sandro Botticelli's famous mythological painting The Birth of Venus and my namesake Titian’s Flora. 

When we look at the painting's composition, Lilith dominates a depthless, yet crowded space as her romantic dress overflows into the implied space of the chair. Her exposed flesh painted without tone or modeling and pale breasts have so little definition that her head and neck dissolve into a lifeless field of undifferentiated skin and don't contrast with the virginal lace dress. However, the lifeless palour of flesh contrasts the vibrant red of her spectacular, highlighted hair. 

And finally to the main event. If we look at the symbolism of flowers her languid nature is reiterated in the depiction of the poppy in the lower right corner—the flower of opium-induced slumber. Throughout history white roses have represented purity and are traditionally associated with the pureness of new love. They link in a semi-corona around Lilith’s upper body, which is reminiscent of another PRB John William Waterhouse’s Detail of Flora and the Zephyrs, whose subject Flora also derives from Roman mythology, in particular Ovid's Fasti. Given that the seductive Lilith was Adam's first wife, the legend behind white roses is almost a perfect metaphor for their relationship as the roses signify cold sensuous love and supposedly only gained their red colouring when the dazzling Eve was created - at which point the rose blushed at the sight of her beauty. For roses to flush red at the very sight of one's face is a rather enviable trait, wouldn't you say?