SOURCE: Danahay, Martin A. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Virtual Bodies.” Victorian Poetry 36, no. 4 (winter 1998): 379-97.

In the following essay, Danahay explores the commodification of women's bodies in Rossetti's paintings and poetry.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's paintings and poems were made available on the World Wide Web in 1993 thanks to Jerome McGann's creation of “The Rossetti Archive” at the University of Virginia (http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/rossetti/rossetti.html).¹ “The Rossetti Archive” appeared alongside a profusion of sites purveying pornographic images, in what proved an ironic juxtaposition. When Rossetti initially created his texts and paintings he did so at the same time that photography promoted the diffusion of cheaply reproduced pornographic images.² Rossetti's paintings are “high” art images executed in oils, but as Robert Buchanan noted in his infamous attack in The Fleshly School of Poetry, of which he considered Rossetti the prime example, these images bore a direct relation...