Between darkness and dream, between painting and poetry: notes on Hand and Soul, a story by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the story Hand and Soul by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, connecting it with the poetic and artistic production of the poet-painter and framing it as a foundational work for Rossetti’s aesthetics. The study aims to highlight the role of poetic manifesto of the story, also emphasizing the important legacy of the text, which influenced authors and theorists of the time and belonging to symbolism and decadentism, helping to define the aesthetic imagery of the late nineteenth century. The analysis starts from a general historical-critical framing of Rossetti’s literary and artistic experience – with appropriate references to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and its experience with the magazine The Germ, spokesperson of the movement’s ideals – and continues with the presentation of some critical and hermeneutic hypotheses related to the fantastic and psychoanalytic perspective and, in particular, to the approach of visual culture studies, highlighting the role of the different devices of vision and the ways in which the visual acts within the story, with appropriate references to the entire Rossetti production from a narrative, poetic and artistic point of view.