Rosetti’s Prosperine
Jan 30th, 2008 by admin
In the spirit of Writing What I Know, I decided that I'd start with some of my all-time favourite pieces. This provided me with some tough decisions, however: Art, music, literature? Shakespeare or Colette? Rosetti, the PRB and Greek sentimentalism, or , with whom I currently have a serious bone to pick? (I do have a bad habit of getting too emotionally involved with paintings - more on that later.) In the end I thought I'd draw on the advice of the venerable Julie Andrews: "Let's start at the very beginning, the very best place to start". I never said I wasn't corny.
There are hundreds of 'very beginnings', of course, and I expect I shall talk about most of them in time. The most relevant one, though, I've decided, is this:
I'm not going to go into the myth behind this painting: it's fairly well known and . It's entitled 'Prosperine' and is by , who I will probably blog about fairly often. It currently hangs in the Tate Gallery in London, and whenever I visit (it's only a bus ride away from my front door, something for which I am very grateful!) I always make sure she's the first and the last painting I look at. She's very special to me, for various reasons. As you've probably noticed my internet (and occasionally offline) moniker is Persephone (the Roman version of the name Prosperine), and I took it straight from her.
It's easy to see her as being melancholy in this painting, even cowed and frightened. If you look at it for long enough, however, another expression seems to emerge - one of hard, stiff determination. There's two sides to this woman - she's not just Persephone, daughter of Demeter and resident of Mount Olympus, cruelly stolen away by a harsh master into the depths. She's also Queen Persephone, ruler of Hades, wife of Pluto. Equally divided between the two places she's dangerous. If she was a role-playing character she'd be Chaotic Neutral, and oh my God I can't believe I just said that.
Look behind her, to the patch of light shining onto the wall. It's as though a door has opened and someone is coming - possibly her husband. There are all sorts of possible interpretations of what he might be about to do but my personal favourite is that her six months of winter has come to an end and he's coming to wish her farewell before she returns to her mother for the summer months. She certainly does want to go back, but there is a part of her that stays behind nonetheless. The pomegranate she holds is not the one that sealed her fate but a symbol of that other fruit. She's done this before. We could even be centuries in to the tale, and still she ascends every summer. The Prosperine in this painting has made Hades her home, and the return to the family is little more than a summer holiday. She has - literally - left her father's home for her husband's.
I shall leave you with the sonnet painted onto the top right-hand corner of the canvas, which goes thusly:
Afar away the light that brings cold cheer
Unto this wall, - one instant and no more
Admitted at my distant palace-door
Afar the flowers of Enna from this drear
Dire fruit, which, tasted once, must thrall me here.
Afar those skies from this Tartarean grey
That chills me: and afar how far away,
The nights that shall become the days that were.
Afar from mine own self I seem, and wing
Strange ways in thought, and listen for a sign:
And still some heart unto some soul doth pine,
O, Whose sounds mine inner sense in fain to bring,
Continually together murmuring -
'Woe me for thee, unhappy Proserpine'.