Focus on A Sea-Spell and explore the Critical reception and analysis.
Jerome McGann wrote that the painting is a "failure", caused by Rossetti's excessive intellectualizing of his work; previous critics suggested, to the contrary, that the work is flawed due to Rossetti's "slipshod" execution.The scholar Helene E. Roberts wrote that the painting is one of a group of depictions of Rossetti's "ideal woman". She wrote that the iconic image of womanhood dominated Rossetti's "dream world", and that the painting is intended to evoke similar reveries in the viewer, citing its musical theme as a prompt for "indolent musing". She argued that, although the combination of daydreaming and womanhood in A Sea-Spell could be pornographic, Rossetti encourages more spiritual responses, emphasizing the subject's face and making her exposed arms "masculine, or at best matronly".Lucien Agosta argued that the piece illustrates a common theme in Rossetti's work, of Art as independent of – and triumphant over – Nature. He noted that Rossetti, in a letter, had written that the subject's song was a "magic lay" and that the sonnet describes unnatural "netherland gulf-whispers", and that the siren's attraction of a bird to listen to her song inverts the relationship of Veronica Veronese, in which the musician is inspired by a bird.
siren sonnet Nature Jerome McGann pornographic Veronica Veronese