Behind this sonnet stands the famous Pauline text “For now we see through a glass, darkly,
but then face to face”
“glass”
through which one may attempt to
represent, and view, the “occult”
order
of things that are the ground of a religious experience. In DGR's reading,
the picture is an occult construction, all of its representational forms
“dark”
and “difficult”
.
It is important to see how obliquely DGR represents the Virgin's face, which
focuses the energies of
Placed as it is, at the head of the final section of the 1870
In 1869 DGR said that he wrote the sonnet “in front of the picture in Brit: Inst: many years
ago”
(Fredeman, Correspondence
The sonnet was not revised in the long proof process that culminated in the publication of the 1870
The sonnet was first published in the 1870
“that outer sea”
makes clear (in the
Louvre version that compelling moment in the London painting is hardly
discernible). Needless to say, DGR's interpretation of the work is highly
idiosyncratic, but quite in line with his general inclination, especially in
the years 1848-1850, to give a programmatic turn to much of what he wrote
and painted.
Subjective as is DGR's response, however, it follows Vasari more closely than one might expect: in the
“so dark, that [...] his pictures had rather the character of things made to represent an effect of night, than the clear quality of daylight”(
“darkness of the end”and given an explicit symbolic resonance.
DGR's reading of Leonardo also has much in common with Pater's famous essay in
“(Peattie,Difficultrhymes withoccult. It is aclassof looseness I dislike: but I don't at all boggle at the effect here, and only mention the point in case you should never have noticed it before”
“the distance from rhyme to rhyme being considerable, and alteration difficult, I have left it”(see
“(see Baum,Whosemay refer to the Lord or to each spirit”