Bocca Baciata

Bocca Baciata is a small oil on panel with which Dante Gabriel Rossetti marked a turning point in his career. It is a half-length image of a woman, the first of his pictures devoted to a single female figure, and it sets out the manner that would later become a hallmark of his work: richly sensuous, calm and densely modelled female figures. The model was Fanny Cornforth, the main inspiration behind the most sensuous figures Rossetti painted.

The title, meaning "mouth that has been kissed", alludes to the sexual experience of the sitter and comes from an Italian proverb written on the back of the panel: a kissed mouth does not lose its good fortune but renews itself, like the moon. Rossetti, an accomplished translator of early Italian literature, probably knew the saying from Boccaccio's Decameron, where it closes the tale of Alatiel, a beautiful Saracen princess who, after many lovers in a few years, manages to present herself to the King of Algarve as a virgin bride.

The picture is also of technical interest. In a letter to William Bell Scott, Rossetti said he was trying to paint the flesh more fully and to avoid a fault he recognised in his own practice: stippling in the skin. He observed that the old masters often achieved their finest results in portraits and simpler pictures, where colour and execution shone most. The painting may owe something to Millais's portrait of his sister-in-law Sophie Gray, completed two years earlier.

Painter

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Date

1859

Medium

oil paint, panel

Dimensions

32 × 27 cm

Museum

Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston

Movement

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Genre

portrait

Depicts

rose, earring, necklace, flower, apple

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