Bocca Baciata

A single woman, painted close and warm. Bocca Baciata, the kissed mouth, was a small picture, but it changed the course of Rossetti's art.

The story behind the painting

Rossetti painted Bocca Baciata in 1859, and it marks a turning point in his career. It was the first of his pictures of a single female figure, and it set the style that later became his signature. The model was Fanny Cornforth, the main inspiration for his sensuous figures. In a letter to William Bell Scott, Rossetti explained that he was trying to paint flesh more fully and to avoid what he called a besetting fault of his, common in Pre-Raphaelite painting: stippling the flesh in tiny touches.

What to look for

The picture is small, about 32 by 27 cm according to Wikidata, and it shows one woman alone. Look at the skin, painted more broadly and fully than in Rossetti's earlier, more finely stippled work, exactly as he described in his letter. He added that even among the good old masters, their portraits and simpler pictures were almost always their masterpieces for colour and execution, and that keeping this in mind might help him learn at last to paint. The single figure, close up, is the whole subject.

Meaning and intent

The title means mouth that has been kissed and refers to the sexual experience of the subject. It comes from an Italian proverb Rossetti wrote on the back of the painting: the mouth that has been kissed does not lose its good fortune, but renews itself as the moon does. Rossetti, an accomplished translator of early Italian literature, probably knew it from Boccaccio's Decameron, where it closes the tale of Alatiel, a beautiful princess who, after eight lovers in four years, still presents herself to the King of the Algarve as his virgin bride.

Legacy

The painting may have been influenced by Millais's portrait of his sister-in-law Sophie Gray, finished two years earlier. What began in this small picture became the pattern for Rossetti's later art: a single woman, close to the viewer, painted with rich flesh and an air of sensuality, with Fanny Cornforth as his principal muse for such figures. The painting is now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, according to Wikidata.