Marie Spartali Rediscovery part one

 

Marie Spartali Stillman, The Last Sight of Fiammetta, 1876

it's always great when a work not seen in public for decades re-appears,  but a special welcome to Spartali's stunning Fiammetta - a real gem and of significance both for her own now rising reputation and for its relation to Rossetti's later Fiammetta..

 As Pamela Gerrish Nunn and I observed many years ago, when the present work was known only from its listing in the Royal Academy catalogue for summer 1876:

‘Eighteen months later, Rossetti asked Spartali to sit to him for his own version of Fiammetta.  Since her reputation as a model has tended to obscure her career as an artist and since she is typically said to owe her pictorial inspiration entirely to Rossetti, it is worth noting that in this case her choice of subject evidently stimulated his own, and that by ‘casting’ Marie as Fiammetta, so to speak, Rossetti implicitly recognised her choice of the theme’. [  Jan Marsh & Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Women Artists and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, 1989, p103]

As Pamela now remarks,  'what a beauty!  Surely destined to be seen as her masterpiece[sic]'.

Inspired  by and titled from an early Italian  sonnet  that Rossetti translated and was re-published in 1874, the subject is the supposed inamorata of Boccaccio  a more or less fictive figure like Dante's Beatrice and Petrarch's Laura.   She is depicted here as a  girl - say in her early teens - dreamily fingering a mandoline amid a bower of roses. 

The format is one popularised in the 1870s wave of Pre-Raphaelitism, which appealed to patrons in the manner of Venetian courtesans or Kneller's Hampton Court Beauties.  This is a large work, in watercolour, where  the figure is finely painted, especially  in the delicately conveyed flesh tones, and the surrounding foliage is more loosely rendered, in order to focus the viewer's attention on Fiammetta.

The picture will be auctioned in September at Bonhams in Bond St - so this is by way of a preview.