This famous drawing gives an important statement of DGR's thoughts about the relation of
pictorial forms of representation to the expression of ideas. Indeed, the picture amounts to a
formal embodiment of its own thinking. Like
DGR named the central idea of the picture “two houses opposite each
other
”. The phrase signifies primarily the opposed houses of worldliness
and spirituality, here shown competing for the soul of Mary Magdalene. But DGR's unusual
drawing forces the phrase to signify as well another, closely related opposition that concerns
the practise of art. For DGR, Pre-Raphaelitism manifested an artistic contradiction that he
sought to illustrate in this drawing.
His argument appears most dramatically as the aesthetic contradiction represented by the image of Christ. The conceptual (though not the emotional) center of the drawing is this image, which enters the picture as an iconic form. This form represents a key moment of pictorial contradiction. Abutting the right border of the picture, and wholly framed within the window space, the form will be seen at the level of the picture plane itself. But it occupies a fundamentally ambiguous position, and we are also invited to see the form more realistically, as a head in a window that opens into a room with other figures, or, finally, as an artistic image like a religious icon. In this last view the image of Christ is placed on the forward plane defined by the exterior wall of Simon's house, as if it were hung there like a picture. In the left and center areas of the drawing, however, Rossetti constructs an illusionistic space in standard perspectival terms. (Those are the terms inviting us to see Christ's head in a window, as part of the drawing's illusion of, and allusion to, “realistic” space.)
The drawing recalls Rossetti's admiration of primitive style and the alternative it offered
to perspectivist rationality. Indeed, the latter becomes here the technical exponent of an art
committed to “soulless self reflections of man's skill
”
(
As in nearly all of Rossetti's work, the drawing is structured around different areas, each of which forms a center of attention in its own right. Perspective does not organize these pictorial areas; rather, it becomes itself a kind of figural event, a way of imagining and representing pictorial space. Rossetti thus makes space function as part of an argument about spiritual and aesthetic values. In the picture, spatial recession locates negative values whereas the icon of the head of Jesus is a positively charged gravity center. That stylistic opposition grounds the programmatic character of the drawing, which argues for a more catholic way of thinking about pictorial space than the Albertian tradition authorized in the academy.
DGR's argument by artistic form becomes further elaborated as we notice the other principal
aesthetic contradiction in the drawing: between the meticulous realism at the level of small
details, on one hand, and the symbolic detail that governs the picture at a higher scale of
perceptual awareness. The fawn that “crops the vine
”, in
DGR's cunning description, brings the differential into sharp focus. The animal locates a
moment of ornamental symbolism in the picture, yet its scale and fine draughtsmanship demand more
attention than might be expected for such an accessory. This out-of-scale treatment of the
pictorial elements is distinctively Pre-Raphaelite. To realize its significance more clearly
one has only to look at DGR's early Poe and Faust drawings, where a more realistic drawing
technique defines the separation of nature and supernature (in
The sonnet that Rossetti wrote to accompany the picture replicates this opposition in the
division between octave and sestet: the former is spoken by the Magdalene's worldly lover,
calling her back; the latter by the Magdalene, who longs for Christ. Her desire receives a
remarkable form of expression when she speaks of “my Bridegroom's face/ That
draws me to him
” (9-10). Playing on the word
“draws,” Rossetti makes an arresting claim for the picture he has
executed. The words lie open to various readings, but all assert the spiritual authority of a
certain kind of art, and of this picture particularly.
DGR contemplated an oil picture on this subject as early as July 1853, and he began
executing a drawing or drawings at that point. He may have made a sketch even earlier. In 1857
he was working assiduously at this elaborated drawing, which he was finishing for the
semi-private Russell Street Pre-Raphaelite exhibition in June. But he kept working on the
drawing through that year and the next, and he seems to have completed his work in 1859 (see
Fredeman,
This work has always been considered one of DGR's greatest pictures. Ruskin in particular
admired it enormously— “magnificent to my mind, in every possible
way
” he wrote at the time to DGR (
DGR's description of the picture in his letter to Mrs. Clapburn (July 1865) defines the Christological symbology. It does not point out that this figurative material also operates at a second-order level, as a quasi-allegorical commentary or programmatic statement of DGR's ideas about art.
Grieve rightly says that “The elaboration of detail is
Düreresque and the composition resembles that of Dürer's
” (
DGR associated the work with his contemporary-life picture
The scene is imaginary and symbolical, though the central event refers to the events
narrated inthe beggar girl's dinner [gave] a kind of equivalent
to Christ's words
” in
DGR con 107 illustrazioni