‘I drew it in as simply as my breath’: absence, presence, and ideal beauty in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Sibylla Palmifera (1866–70) ‘double work of art’

Abstract

Abstract Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Sibylla Palmifera or Soul's Beauty (1866–1870) ‘double work of art’ is one of his most recognizable pictures and anthologized poems. His visual-verbal ‘double works’ – typically painting-sonnet composites that share a title, comment on each other, and elaborate on a joint subject – remain, however, understudied. Their cross-medium composition presents a challenge to segregated art-historical and literary scholarship. Almost all studies on these picture-word composites take a monodisciplinary approach and predominantly address a single component: the picture or the poem. Engagement with the other component is either cursory or non-existent. In (re)constructing the Sibylla ‘double works’, this essay argues for a renewed understanding of the viewer-reader and viewing-reading. The formation of the visual-verbal exchange at the heart of the ‘double work’ also results in problematic gaps, dissonances, and ruptures in visual-verbal representation. In a manner yet to be addressed in scholarship, this essay demonstrates how Rossetti exploits both alignment and divergence in the Sibylla ‘double work’ to inform and structure the viewer-reader’s encounter with the absence and presence generated by ideal beauty. By reassessing the wider relationship between (and experience of) picture and word, this essay situates the ‘double work’ form at the centre of image-text studies – and exposes the challenge that they present to disparate scholarship and methodologies.