Focus on this artwork and explain the abstract.
Ligeia Siren is a chalk drawing by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (DGR) that was completed in 1873. The painting depicts a siren, a creature from classic Greek mythology, that also appear in tales such as Homer's Odyssey or Virgil's Georgics. The drawing is predominantly inspired from Rossetti's own 1869 libretto The Doom of the Sirens with which Ligeia is one of the female leads. Instead of depicting the traditional encounter of the siren with her victims entranced by her beauty and powers of music, doomed to a terrible fate, as in The Siren (1900) by John William Waterhouse or Ulysses and the Sirens (1909) by Herbert James Draper. Rossetti depicts a timeless moment, where contrary to his depiction of her in his libretto, she appears tranquil and relatively innocuous to her intended victims in the background.In his extremely detailed documentation of his brother's life and works, William Michael Rossetti documented DGR writing of Ligeia Siren as "certainly one of my best things" and though it was only a drawing done in chalk that it was "quite an elaborate picture." The body is that of an unknown woman, however face of the drawing is that of model Alexa Wilding, with whom Rossetti drew and painted often and can be seen as the subject of many of his works at this time such as La Ghirlandata and Veronica Veronese. She is standing amongst vegetation. with an exotic instrument, staring out into the distance. The bird on the instrument acts to identify the female figure as a siren from antiquity, as they were originally depicted with wings or "birds inhabited by soulds of the dead.
Virgil Dante Gabriel Rossetti Ulysses and the Sirens siren libretto Georgics John William Waterhouse Homer Alexa Wilding William Michael Rossetti Herbert James Draper La Ghirlandata Odyssey The Siren Veronica Veronese