The picture is one of the three or four greatest of DGR's
works done after the manner of Titian, Veronese, and the other Venetian Old Masters. Like the others, it is a programmatic work, the representation of which is a figura, in the medieval sense,
of art as an ideal and idealizing practice. This character of the
picture is clear from DGR's description of it (in a letter of September 1866 to John
Mitchell) as a “match to your more classical
. At that point DGR called the picture
Venus Veneta, to emphasize the particular artistic
vision (or style) he was trying to represent. That is to say, DGR's
painting represents “the Venetian ideal of female
beauty”
: it is a symbol, or what Charles Peirce would call an
index, of a type of artistic practice (see
These ideas about his art led DGR to
rename the picture Belcolore in 1873,
when he took it back for some repainting. Quoting his brother, WMR
pointed out that the title
“
(see Monna Vanna had . . . a thirteenth-century sound
about it, being got by Rossetti out of Dante; and he felt it to be
inappropriate for so comparatively modern-looking a picture”in extenso). The new
title is a virtual label for the picture's programmatic status
(“
).Belcolore [i.e. Fair Colour] . . . had served
as a female name in Venice”
“a self-centred
character revealed by every feature, lovely as these are”
. The
jewels and gorgeous attire all signify her modernity and worldliness, and when Stephens writes that “Her lips that have been often
kissed are cherry-coloured, ripe and full, yet not warmed by inner
passion, nor exalted by rapture of contemplation”
, he is
specifically alluding to the connection between this picture and the
first of DGR's great Venetian exercises,
Despite DGR's wishes, the painting descends to us still
bearing its original title. The latter underscores the association of
the picture with the beloved of Dante's friend Guido Cavalcanti, the
Monna Vanna
of the “Madonna
Giovanna”
, but there is no question that DGR means the
abbreviated form to suggest the meanings “vain”
and
“fickle”
. The word “fickle”
is especially apt
in this case because 1.) it is the word that DGR himself applies to
Cavalcanti in his note to the Belcolore (from Monna Vanna) is to
shift the moral focus to the periphery and to
emphasize the aesthetic issues at
stake in the picture. In either case we are, of course, dealing with a
quasi-allegorical situation.
This picture illustrates DGR's subtle and effective use of
color. White and gold, colors associated with innocence and glory, here
become disassociated from those spiritual valuations.
We may usefully compare this picture with, say, the 1864 watercolour
DGR began this picture in 1866 and was nearing completion
on 27 September 1866 (see
When the picture was first exhibited in 1883 it was a
great success, according to
The pastiche of a Venetian style functions as an
iconograph of art as a practice of visionary knowledge. Implicitly the
painting “reads”
the history of art (in this case
focussing on one
particular epoch in that history) as a story of different forms of
ideal vision. The moral ambiguity of the
picture—the worldliness that it puts on display—is itself
brought forward in an Ideal Form, i.e., in the form of a work of art.
The jewelry, fan, and sumptuous dress signal the worldliness represented through the image.
The spiral ornament in the woman's hair—one of DGR's favorite pictorial accessories in his Venetian-inspired pictures—focuses the general compositional character of the portrait, which is a webwork of dynamic and circling curves. DGR designed the jewel-piece himself.
Alastair Grieve says that the lady's “great sleeve
recalls that in Raphael's portrait of ‘Giovanna of Aragon’
in the Louvre”
(see