Retro Me, Sathana!

This picture is an emblematic interpretation of the sonnet of the same title that DGR wrote in 1847. At that point, 1847-1848, the picture is clearly part of a double work of Rossettian art. Later, when DGR reimagined the sonnet for inclusion in The House of Life , the picture lost most of its significance for the sonnet.

DGR executed the drawing with this title in July 1848 and he began but never finished an oil version, which he worked at for three or four months (see Family Letters I. 99). The drawing depicts a scene that has no imagistic relation to the sonnet. The picture shows a priest walking with a pious young woman, with Mephistopheles lurking in the rear. The drawing was done in July 1848 and has much in common with DGR's Faust drawings of that period.

The drawing recalls Faust but is not specifically an illustration of that work. It operates more as an emblematic illustration of virtue being protected from threatening evil.

Eriko Yamaguchi has identified a pictorial source for this work in Camille Bonnard's Costumes Historiques (1829). The priest's garb was designed after a plate representing a fifteenth-century Podestat .

• Baum, The House of Life, 204.
• Marillier, DGR: An Illustrated Memorial , 17, 216, 234.
• Mégroz, Painter Poet of Heaven and Earth , 48.
• Rees, The Poetry of DGR, 81-82.
• WMR, DGR as Designer and Writer , 250-51.
• Surtees, A Catalogue Raisonné , vol. 1, 9 (no. 37).
• Yamaguchi, “Rossetti's Use of Bonnard's Costumes Historiques,” 5-36.