Musical Experience in the Bower: D. G. Rossetti, Listening, and Space

Abstract

Abstract This essay traces Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s use of the bower as a visual space in relation to musical subject matter. Following the increasing popularity of instrumental music and musical discourse in the mid-nineteenth century, the idea of art music and its expressive abilities had become a pervasive discourse for painters. Through an examination of Rossetti’s images of bowers with a musical subject – specifically The Blue Bower (1865), Veronica Veronese (1872), and La Ghirlandata (1873) – this essay explores ideas of musical temporality and artistic spatiality, tonal relations between colour and music, and Rossetti’s emphasis on subjective experience in these images. The bower became a crucial feature in this exploration of music and painting, signalling a visual space characterized by ideas of immersion, artistic correspondences, and the abstracting of colour and form. This essay proposes that Rossetti’s bowers were sites of visual immersion for its viewers, alluding and appealing to the sensuous impact music could have on a listener by mimicking listening behaviour in a visual format. My discussion uncovers new contexts for Rossetti’s musical images and draws parallels between listening and viewing behaviour for both the Victorian and current public. The essay concludes that visual sites alluding to music can act as immersive spaces, contending that abstraction and temporality are drawn out in painting by virtue of an appeal to music.