The difficulty of giving an exact formulation of
the meaning
of this splendid sonnet is the poem's sign
to the reader of its
argument. As DGR's note to the
modern spectator may seek vainly to interpret” the painting, even though —paradoxically—“
its meaning filleth it”. DGR's poem means to replicate in itself this effect it ascribes to the Mantegna painting. Baum's view of the sonnet is that “
Rossetti, feeling that Mantegna painted chiefly for pictorial effect and assuming that he was not clearly conscious of the meaning he wanted to convey, attempts to supply the clue to the allegory: namely, that the life of the senses is permanent, while the labour of the mind may be in vain” (see Baum,
meaning” (allegorical). But those lines are themselves only
meaning”, they define the difference between the knowledge opened through artistic acts and the knowledge prized by interpreters, whether positivist or hermeneutical.
WMR's view (allegorical
) discourse. Whatever, WMR's
reading of the sonnet is attractive: “that the
emotion of the artist . . . is
manifest, but not the particular thought which governed it
”.
The play of language in lines 1-3 is crucial, and pivots on
the double meaning of “frame
”. Depending on how one takes that
word, we will read the lines as saying that (a) the unheard music that
governs the dance rang through Mantegna's body and resulted in this
great picture, the execution of which involved him in an experience of
profound conceptual
awareness; (b) Mantegna embodied the unheard music that governs the dance
in this picture, and when he himself saw what he had painted he experienced
an understanding of ultimate meaning. Note that in either case DGR is
emphasizing the cognitive power of pictorial forms of expression. So far as the rich language of the sonnet is concerned, equally important is the remarkable way that DGR works the pronominal “it”.
An early
The poem would have been written in October 1849. This copy, however, might have been made shortly thereafter; since
A
DGR revised the original MS text quite substantially when he came to publish it in the
First published in the
WMR's note to the poem says that it “represents
beyond a doubt the Muses (or other Deities) dancing to the music of Apollo
while Vulcan is at his forge
” (
It is necessary to mention, that this picture would appear to have been in the artist's mind an allegory, which the modern spectator may seek vainly to interpret.”
meaning” is meant here: whether the meaning of whatever vision or idea initially led Mantegna to make his painting, or the meaning of the painting itself; music: i.e., the (unapparent but implicit) music that orders the “
Allegorical Dance of Women”.
vague”.
may refer to the dance, to the pensive figure's ‘blind fixedness of thought’, or to the painting as artifact” (