DGR has left extensive comments on this important picture, but since his remarks are meshed with his commercial purposes, they complicate and may even confuse the issues. Nonetheless, the comments are primary documents and must be treated as such.
Shortly after beginning the painting he told Frederick Leyland, who bought
the work, that it was “an entirely new picture from the
Palmifera model
” (letter to Leyland, 25 Jan. 1872,
<xref doc="a.s193.rap">Sibylla Palmifera</xref>
excessively; he quickly agreed to purchase the new work. By early
March, when the painting was nearing completion, DGR wrote again to Leyland
that “I mean to call the violin picture
‘
” (see
Veronica Veronese
’ which sounds
like the name of a musical genius
On August 18, 1875 DGR again wrote to Leyland that he was beginning to work on
“a picture as companion to the
‘
.”
(Veronica
’
, which he represented as another treatment of
“musical genius
”:
“here [ie., in
” (ibid.). But when he began
the picture he represented it to Leyland as “
<xref doc="a.s248.rap">A Sea-Spell</xref>
] the bird listens to the player, as in the other picture the
player listens to the birda companion
to
.” In what respect it paired with the latter isn't very
clear, even when we consider DGR's further comments: “I
think of calling it [i.e.,
” (
Veronica Veronese
] the Day Dream. The girl is in a sort of passionate reverie
& is drawing her hand listlessly along the strings of a violin
which hangs against the wall, while she holds the bow with the other
hand, as if arrested by thought at the moment when she was about to
play. In colour I shall make the picture chiefly a study of varied
greens.
So the picture is at once a figura of “musical
genius
” and a purely formal “study of
varied greens
.” These two conceptualizations of the work
are not, for DGR, mutually exclusive. As a poem like “
As a pure colour study, then, the picture is being seen in a similarly
idealized way. In short, the painting means to be a highly eclectic
representation of what Sarah Phelps Smith accurately describes as
“the creative process, or Art
itself
.”
The highly decorative character of the picture emphasizes its aesthetic argument, which is more or less explicitly rendered in the title DGR chose for the work. It means literally “a true Veronesian image.” Stephens' early commentary called attention to the studied Veronesian manner of the picture, which falls squarely within the series of Venetian-inspired works that DGR had been doing since in late 1850s. Like those works, this picture is an effort to execute an ideal portrait. It is not primarily the portrait of a certain woman, it is DGR's visionary representation of the soul of Veronesian art, as he understood it.
The work seems to have been done entirely in early 1872, between January and
March (when it was completed). The only extant
We want to register the absence of a determinate moral attitude in DGR's
paintings of this kind. The implicit argument—perhaps it is an
assumption—is that while art is a spiritual activity, its forms of
expression are always particular, concrete, physical. The (existential)
conflict of soul and body has no inherent parallel in an aesthetic frame of
reference, in DGR's view. (This was a view with which Holman Hunt, Buchanan,
and others did not agree.) Consequently, the moral import of DGR's pictures,
particularly after 1858, is usually ambiguous. We glimpse DGR's attitude in
certain comments he made about this picture to his patron Leyland. In
January 1872 he said it should be thought of as “a
companion
” to
<xref doc="a.s205.rap">Lady Lilith</xref>
, but in March its companion was said to be
<xref doc="a.s248.rap">A Sea-Spell</xref>
. Both of those pictures define ambiguous moral antitheses. The latter
picture, for instance, is associated both with Coleridge's
“damsel with a dulcimer
” and with the
sea sirens, while Lilith is in one view a demonic spirit, and in another
Adam's prelapsarian beloved. Neverthless, although thematically similar in
this way, the two pictures could scarcely be more different in their
implications. The Lilith picture emphasizes the hard and threatening
qualities of the woman (as in Sister
Helen
The same kind of ambiguity plays around
Veronica Veronese
—its stylisitc inspiration coming from a painter whose reputation was that of a brilliant, even a
supreme technician, but one devoted to “worldly
splendour
” and to a “beauty. . .addressed
more to the senses than to the soul
” (these are the
terms used by Kugler in Eastlake's translation of his
Italian Schools of Painting
(1837; 1851), which DGR knew very well and often drew upon). Hunt
recoiled from DGR's turn to Venetian models, which he saw as the pursuit of
an aesthetic committed to “mere gratification of the eye
and if any passion at all—the animal passion. . .for my part I
disavow any sort of sympathy with such notion if Art could not do better
service than dress up the worst vices in the garb only deserved by
innocence and virtue
” (see
In an effort to represent a Veronesian artistic ethos, the painting draws upon
certain common views of the great Venetian master. Particularly notable for
this work are Kugler's remarks about Veronese in Eastlake's translation of
his
Italian Schools of Painting
: Veronese's pictures were distinguished by
“comprehensive keeping and harmony
”;
and “Never was the pomp of colour so exalted as in his
works, which may be likened to concerts of enchanting
music
” (chapter 22). The literalness with which DGR's
picture takes up that last thought is a kind of second-order emblem of his
incarnational approach to art and its idealizing purposes.
The title of the picture has two important Dantean references: to the
Vita Nuova
chapter XL and to the
Paradiso
XXXI.103-111. Both deal with the image of Christ's face impressed on
the cloth that Veronica used to cleanse his bloody face on his way to his
death on Calvary. In each case Dante is treating in a complex allegorical
fashion the importance of a “vera icon[ica],” or a
“true image” that will lead the desiring soul to a
meditative contact with divinity.
Body's Beauty