DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61290#0233
CUMBERLAND
189
delight of his enthusiastic counsel and his frank,
outspoken, but never ungenerous criticism. Such
witness is fully endorsed by Mr. Caine’s records
even of this last autumn of his life, when, through
shattered health and failing hopes for his own
future, he retained in a great measure the mental
vision and acumen of happier days, as well as his
own creative power in design and poetry. Rossetti
never tired of these nightly discussions of the
inexhaustible topics of literary art: he loved to
prolong them far into the morning hours ; and often,
as his friend has told us, they saw the sunrise break
over the great hills as they went at last to rest.
Nor was the year without fruit in painting.
The pathetic picture of “ La Pia,” a new design in
oils, though with a title used for a sketch in 1867,
ranks high among his later performances. The
subject, briefly broached in Dante’s “ Purgatorio,”
deals with the imprisonment of the young wife of
Nello dell’ Pietra of Siena in a fortress in the
Maremma, in the midst of a noxious swamp.
Rossetti was still at work, too, upon the great sym-
bolic picture in which he was endeavouring to sum
up all that he had implied in his maturer treatment
of womanly beauty,—the mystic and solemn
"Venus Astarte” or “Astarte Syriaca ” (the
Syrian Venus). The “ Cassandra ” proposed by
him somewhile previously was never far advanced,
but he had painted in 1880 a somewhat inferior
189
delight of his enthusiastic counsel and his frank,
outspoken, but never ungenerous criticism. Such
witness is fully endorsed by Mr. Caine’s records
even of this last autumn of his life, when, through
shattered health and failing hopes for his own
future, he retained in a great measure the mental
vision and acumen of happier days, as well as his
own creative power in design and poetry. Rossetti
never tired of these nightly discussions of the
inexhaustible topics of literary art: he loved to
prolong them far into the morning hours ; and often,
as his friend has told us, they saw the sunrise break
over the great hills as they went at last to rest.
Nor was the year without fruit in painting.
The pathetic picture of “ La Pia,” a new design in
oils, though with a title used for a sketch in 1867,
ranks high among his later performances. The
subject, briefly broached in Dante’s “ Purgatorio,”
deals with the imprisonment of the young wife of
Nello dell’ Pietra of Siena in a fortress in the
Maremma, in the midst of a noxious swamp.
Rossetti was still at work, too, upon the great sym-
bolic picture in which he was endeavouring to sum
up all that he had implied in his maturer treatment
of womanly beauty,—the mystic and solemn
"Venus Astarte” or “Astarte Syriaca ” (the
Syrian Venus). The “ Cassandra ” proposed by
him somewhile previously was never far advanced,
but he had painted in 1880 a somewhat inferior