Part One
Cross-Cultural Networks
The Myth of Psyche in the Work of DâAnnunzio and Burne-Jones
Giuliana Pieri
Abstract
In her article, âThe Myth of Psyche in the Work of DâAnnunzio and Burne-Jones,â Giuliana Pieri analyzes a case of double ekphrasis. âThe Story of Cupid and Psyche,â in William Morrisâs The Earthly Paradise (1868-70), was the initial stimulus for Edward Burne-Jones, who produced many works inspired by Morrisâs retelling of the classical story. In turn, one of Burne-Jonesâs watercolors of Cupid Finding Psyche was to inspire the Italian poet and writer Gabriele DâAnnunzio, who, in the 1880s and 1890s, went through a distinct Pre-Raphaelite and neo-Renaissance phase. Burne-Jonesâs highly personal treatment of his poetic source is contrasted with DâAnnunzioâs close reading of Burne-Jonesâs watercolor in the poem âPsiche giacenteâ in the Poema paradisiaco (1893). DâAnnunzioâs and Burne-Jonesâs Psyche are virginal medieval maidens on the verge of transforming into more fully fledged femmes fatales. Both artist and poet explore ideas of sleep, dream, and stillness and their relations to female imagery in the Aesthetic and Decadent context.
Henry James described Edward Burne-Jonesâs painting as an âart of culture, of reflection, of intellectual luxury, of aesthetic refinement, of people who look at the world and at life not directly, as it were, and in all its accidental reality, but in the reflection and ornamental portrait of it furnished by art itself in other manifestationsâ (qtd. in Spalding 16). The focus on art, beauty, and the aesthetic is also the fundamental characteristic of the work of Gabriele DâAnnunzio, the ultimate Italian dandy; a flamboyant and controversial figure who dominated the Italian world of letters, culture, and fashion from his first arrival in Rome in 1881 at the age of eighteen until his death in the late 1930s (Woodhouse, Gabriele DâAnnunzio 1-7; Andreoli, DâAnnunzio 7-12). DâAnnunzio played a major part in the reception of Pre-Raphaelite art in Italy in the 1880s and 1890s and helped create, especially in Rome, a fashionable Pre-Raphaelitism which encompassed painting, the decorative arts, book illustration, and dress history (see Pieri, The Influence). DâAnnunzio mentioned Burne-Jones for the first time in an essay in 1887, referring to him as âthe greatest contemporary English painterâ (âil piĂš gran pittore inglese contemporaneoâ [âUn poetaâ 937]). DâAnnunzio focuses on the spurious Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic poet Adolfus Hannaford and the article has been viewed as proof of DâAnnunzioâs confused notion of the Pre-Raphaelite movement wrongly equating the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with the Aesthetic school of poetry and painting (see Woodhouse, âCurioserâ). Yet, the article did also show how, in DâAnnunzioâs mind, Aestheticism and Pre-Raphaelitism were almost entirely interchangeable terms and this helps to explain DâAnnunzioâs fascination with the English Pre-Raphaelites. Burne-Jonesâs Aestheticism, the idea of art as an alternative to everyday life and the nostalgic but visually accurate evocation of the classical and Renaissance past, was in tune with DâAnnunzioâs own poetic Pre-Raphaelitism, which he developed in the 1880s and early 1890s and in which the precise evocation of the meter, style, and language of early Renaissance poetry was the backdrop for his own reworking of medieval and neo-medieval imagery under the influence of European Symbolism and Decadence.
In the present study I focus on a case of double ekphrasis which takes as its starting point the classical story of Cupid and Psyche, originally in book 4 of Apuleiusâs Metamorphoses, or the Golden Ass, and retold by William Morris in The Earthly Paradise (1868-70). The latter is a long and complex narrative poem which revisits classical and medieval legends. It comprises four volumes and more than 42,000 lines. In 1893, DâAnnunzio published a new collection of poems entitled Poema Paradisiaco and in the section âHortus Larvarum,â the poem âPsiche giacente (Da Burne-Jones)â thus presents the poem as inspired by the English painter. The poem is both an iconotext, which shows a careful and sensitive handling of its visual source, and a testimony to the complexity of DâAnnunzioâs Pre-Raphaelite imagery at the time, combining Pre-Raphaelite, early Renaissance, and purely Decadent motifs (see the poemâs full text and first translation into English by Jane Everson in the appendix at the end of this article; Jane Eversonâs version is used whenever the poem is quoted in translation).
It was Bianca Tamassia Mazzarotto who first identified the visual source of DâAnnunzioâs poem âPsiche giacenteâ as one of the drawings by Burne-Jones from the series of designs for William Morrisâs âThe Story of Cupid and Psycheâ in The Earthly Paradise. She notes that âit is not a painting but one of the seventy drawings done in 1866 on Cupid and Psycheâ (499). Burne-Jonesâs designs were intended for the illustrated edition of Morrisâs poem and are now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. This attribution has so far remained unchallenged, and a note in the most recent edition of DâAnnunzioâs collected poems simply states that Burne-Jones âillustrated the story of Cupid and Psyche. The drawing of Psyche found by Cupid while sleeping by a fountain has been transposed into verse by DâAnnunzioâ (Versi dâamore 1168). However, DâAnnunzio could not possibly have seen these drawings, since Morris abandoned the project of an illustrated edition in 1868 and the illustrations were never published during DâAnnunzioâs lifetime (see Dunlap). All evidence suggests that Burne-Jonesâs original drawings were kept private and they were bequeathed by the artist to John Ruskin and were later part of the Ruskin bequest to the School of Drawing in Oxford on the occasion of Ruskinâs appointment as Slade Professor of Art. Another series of works connected to the drawings are at the William Morris Gallery, London Borough of Waltham Forest: they are the wood-engraved proofs (ca. 1868) for the illustrated edition of The Earthly Paradise (see Marcus 268-83). Two further volumes with preliminary sketches for these illustrations are at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York (see Christian, âThe Compulsiveâ 62-69; see also Christian, Edward Burne-Jones).
All of Burne-Jonesâs drawings and sketches were done during an intense period of activity and collaboration with Morris between 1858âwhen Morris published The Defence of Guinevereâand 1867, when Morris was still planning an illustrated edition of The Earthly Paradise. Modeled on Chaucerâs Canterbury Tales and Boccaccioâs Decameron, The Earthly Paradise is a series of twenty-four tales with a complex frame narrative, a seasonal pattern, and two stories for each month, one classical and one medieval, each recounted by a member of a group to entertain the others. Morrisâs sources are mainly Greek, Scandinavian, Celtic, and Arabian. The work was conceived as an âescape from contemporary problems,â with its tales of romance and adventure set at some indefinite point in the medieval past (Harrison and Waters 78). There is parallel between the stylistic change of Morris and that of Burne-Jones in the second half of the 1860s: âa similar moving away from the earlier Rossetti-inspired paintings; the designs made to accompany The Earthly Paradise show the transition . . . Poet and painter were both leaving the overdominant influence of Rossetti to look for a more personal expressionâ (Harrison and Waters 79). One of the results of this change is Morrisâs emphasis on description and a slowing down of the narrative, which has the effect of âa hypnotic stagnation, remote from reality, which beguiles the readerâ (Harrison and Waters 78). In turn, this had a stylistic impact on Burne-Jones, who was becoming increasingly interested in exploiting a sense of narrative stillness and the emphasis on the descriptive through his use of color, form, and surface texture.
âThe Story of Cupid and Psycheâ is one of eight tales in The Earthly Paradise with Venus as a figure: it is the Classical Tale for May (see Boos, âThe Storyâ 235-51). Psyche is in many ways a quintessential Pre-Raphaelite beauty with golden hair, associated with lilies and music: âSo must she fall, so must her golden hair / Flash no more through the city, or her feet / Be seen like lilies moving down the street; / No more must men watch her soft raiment cling / About her limbs, no more must minstrels sing / The praise of her arms and hidden breastâ (The Earthly Paradise, lines 304-09). Florence Saunders Boos notes that, like many other female characters in the poem, Psyche seems passive before the agents of her fate, and âin several of its elements Morrisâ myth of Psyche follows Victorian paradigms of the âgoodâ womanâs response to sexualityâ (âThe Designsâ 237). Despite being presented as an archetypal Victorian heroine in her faithfulness, patience, and lack of guile, like other good women in ...