Article: Mastering the ineffable: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "The Vase of Life" and the Kantian sublime.(Immanuel Kant)

Any reader of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's ekphrastic poems (that is, poems at take a work of art as their object) must be struck by the ineffability he attributes to paintings or the subjects they represent. Leonardo da Vinci's Our Lady of the Rocks deals with "things occult"; Andrea Mantenga's Allegorical Dance of Women is full of the "secret of the wells of Life," which the heart knows but the mind can know nothing of. These visual scenes are "mysteries," a word Rossetti uses to open three of his ekphrastic poems. (1) They cannot be known intellectually, cannot be solved. Their meaning can only be vaguely intuited but cannot be expressed. Rossetti seems to be positing ...

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