“a very large young woman, almost a giantess,”whom DGR
“noticed in the street”(
Critics often date a change in DGR's painting style from this work, although in fact the change is discernible in work beginning in 1859. The shift is toward a more sumptuous surface, and a turn to Venetian models. A notable increase in decorative accessories locates important shifts in general conception, in the deployment of color, and in the overall composition. These changes were deplorable to Ruskin, and his strictures on this painting eventually caused a rupture in the relations between the two.
The painting epitomizes the ambiguities that invest so many of the highly
decorative female portraits that DGR produced, from “certain conditions of
non-sentiment . . . underlie all you are doing now,”
goes to the heart of the matter, for these female figures radiate at once
great erotic power, great worldliness, and great indifference. They seem as
well, perhaps paradoxically, great spiritual presences, although by no means
morally sympathetic. William Sharp's descriptive analysis of the present
painting is much to the point: “The Venus of this picture
is no Aphrodite, fresh and white and jubilant from the foam of Idalian
seas, nor is she Love incarnate or human passion; but she is a queen of
Love who loves not herself, a desire that is unsatiable and remorseless,
absolute, supreme. . . . She is the Lust of the Flesh that perisheth
not, though around her loves and lives and dreams are evermore becoming
as nought”
(
The title of the painting, out of Lempriere, signifies Venus as the
“turner of hearts,”
which is
ambiguous enough in itself. Lempriere says that she turns the heart to
chastity, and if DGR follows this thought he would be imagining the turn as
a consequence of the implacable revelation that his Venus brings. Such a
figure is the model and forecast of a host of similar female figures that
preoccupy the visions of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
decadent and symbolist artists.
John Mitchell, of Bradford, commissioned the work in late 1863, when DGR
made a
WMR said that DGR was almost finished with the oil in May 1868, and that he
finally sent it to Mitchell in September 1869 (Rossetti Papers
1862 to 1870,
DGR's brother said that DGR “must at some time or
other—probably towards 1873—have got it back from
the purchaser, and reworked upon it very
extensively”
. According to WMR these late changes
destroyed “the freshness and spontaneity of the entire
conception and treatment”
(
DGR made at least two and perhaps three water-color replicas. Two are listed
in Surtees and the third is mentioned there. One has
Two early notices were quite favorable: Swinburne's essay included as Part
II of the “freshness and spontaneity of. . .conception and
treatment.”
As WMR noted: “This was
only one instance out of many of an uneasy over-fastidiousness on my
brother's part. . . .”
(
The painting is most significant in DGR's career because it triggered
Ruskin's quarrel with a
certain “coarseness”
he professed to
find in DGR's work, and that he did not see in the earlier pictures,
whatever Ruskin thought of the technical weaknesses he found in those
pictures (Rossetti Papers
1862 to 1870
Putting a halo behind the head of the naked bust of Venus fairly defines the startling contradictions raised by this picture (and its accompanying sonnet).
Grieve argues that the picture displays various“fifteenth-
and sixteenth-century prototypes, in this case possibly Van der Weyden's
(
The historical significance of the picture is a highly oblique one, but nonetheless present. We glimpse it through the picture's accompanying sonnet: it refers to the Matter of Troy and that material carried for DGR, as it did for Tennyson, ominous contemporary political suggestions.
The pendant
Vision and Difference
Venus and
Burne–Jones' Mermaid: Invitations to
Dialogue” (2003)