Dante gabriel rossetti: books

As the Guildhall Art Gallery's brief guide points out, La Ghirlandata issues in "a new aesthetic of painting" and indeed the whole "Cult of Beauty," which would develop into the full-blown Aesthetic Movement (6).

La Ghirlandata - London Picture Archive

F. G. Stephens described the painting in this way:

It shows the green-clad Lady of the Garlands sitting among the golden foliage of a thorn tree and mvrtle copse; her hands are drawing music from a harp beside her seat, and her face proved her soul to be absorbed in the sound she produces. On either side, over her shoulders, an angel looks from between the glowing upper leaves of the copse, as if Heaven itself waited upon her song.

Round the summit of the harp is slung a garland of roses and honey-suckles, the sweetest of earthly flowers, and the sky above, where the day of earth is dying, hints in its calm, ardent depths of a sweetness still beyond. The evening breeze has just risen and begins to lift the light drapery above her shoulders. In colour, this picture is chie