Mimesis: Artistic Representation/Reality
One of the poem’s primary concerns is with the difference between reality and the representation of reality through art, sometimes referred to as mimesis, a term coined by the Greek philosopher Plato. Historically, the theory of mimesis says that reality is always greater than, or closer to perfection than art. In other words, art can never be purely original, but only imitative. With “In an Artist’s Studio” though, Christina Rossetti suggests that the theory of mimesis might not necessarily be a one-way street; perhaps art, she implies, can itself approach the perfection of reality.
By suggesting that every canvas portrait the artist paints representing the woman “means the same one meaning”, Rossetti effectively argues that art can reach perfection. If art could never be perfect, then no two paintings could ever be able to communicate an identical meaning. Furthermore, Rosetti then implies that the woman who is perfectly represented in these portraits does not in fact exist, except as an ideation in the artist’s mind. This suggests that paintings have creating an original meaning, rather than representing something that was already there. Therefore, since these portraits are both perfect and generative of a meaning that did not otherwise exist (the ideal woman in the portraits) Rossetti’s poem posits a reverse conception of mimesis, where art takes precedence over reality.
The Muse: The Objectification of Women in Art
“In an Artist’s Studio” can be also be seen as Rossetti offering a critique of artists' objectification of women in art. Too often, the argument goes, women are seen simply as an artist’s muse, as the highest object of artistic representation, no doubt leading to the gross reduction and simplification of women, even to the point where they become interchangeable. The poem invokes this idea quite explicitly; upon entering the studio, the speaker is struck by the fact that although the artist may attempt to create a new portrait each time he paints, he seemingly can do nothing more than produce the same meaning, the same face again and again.
This objectification of women as the muse of art has some biographical basis in Rossetti’s life; her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, on whose studio and artistic obsession with his wife (Elizabeth Siddal) Rossetti based this poem, considered Christina to be his “first muse.” When he fell in love with Siddal, Christina was displaced as the source of Dante’s inspiration, and instead began producing her own profound work. In doing so, she commented on her pre-Raphaelite brother’s tendency to flatten and homogenize all feminine representation to the point of idealized identicality.
Sonnet as Room
Christina Rossetti’s “In an Artist’s Studio” is remarkable for a number of reasons, one of which being her apt skill at crafting a Petrarchan sonnet. As you might already know, “sonnet” in the original Italian means “room,” and as a poetic form, a sonnet is supposed to function like a room, containing the lyrical experience of a particular event. Here, Rossetti plays with this convention, writing a sonnet that not only offers a standalone “room-like” experience, but also takes as its setting and theme a particular room, namely an artist’s studio. By playing with the theme of the Petrarchan sonnet, Rossetti effectively derives content from form.
Sonnet as an Expression of Love
More than simply playing on the motif of a sonnet as "room," "In An Artist's Studio" takes the convention of the sonnet as love lyric, and does something unique. Instead of using the 14 lines of Petrarchan verse to express her own love, Rossetti crafts a speaker who finds herself more concerned with the artist’s objectified love for a woman he paints. While a conventional Petrarchan sonnet tends to look inward, taking as a subject one’s own feelings of love for another, Rossetti innovates by looking outwards; her speaker tells not of her inward experience/emotion, but rather than outward of expression of the love of another. As she walks through the studio staring at each portrait, Rossetti’s sonnet uses poetry to examine lyric in the form of visual art.
Alternative Sex: Art as a Form of Sensuality
Even though Rossetti’s speaker does not describe her own experience with creating art, she does use this sonnet as a space for delineating the sensual relationship artists often describe having with their work. Here—as it so often happens in poetry—sensuality stands in for sexual desire. Notice how in Rossetti’s sonnet, the artist’s desire for the woman in his portrait turns visceral: “he feeds upon her face,” Rossetti writes, and from here, readers need not stretch their imagination too far in seeing how hunger can be equated with sexual desire, especially when that hunger, the feeding of the artist, is directed towards the face of a woman.
Art as Ownership
This theme is a bit subtler, but certainly one can argue that “In an Artist’s Studio” explores how artistic representation gets leveraged as an assertion of ownership for the object portrayed. For Rossetti’s artist, such an assertion of ownership only doubles down on the objectification of the woman with whom the speaker is enamored. In a context of ownership, the multiplicity of paintings, with their “same one meaning,” act like something akin to a deed, suggesting that with each painting, the artist comes to feel more entitled to the woman he paints, a problematic idea that Rossetti seems interested in critiquing.
Art as Memorial
Now, after the advent of post-modernism, it has become common to argue that artistic representation has a shifting temporal identity. In other words, the meaning of art, what a portrait or a poem represents, is not singular, or fixed by the artist. Instead—according to this view—the meaning of a work of art can be seen to shift with different cultural and historical contexts, so as to contain a proliferation of meanings.
However, Christina Rossetti’s speaker does not sympathize with such a view—and for good reason, since this poem was written far before the articulation of a such an artistic theory. Instead, she propounds a view of artistic representation as static. The woman represented has no temporal existence. Rossetti writes: “And she with true kind eyes looks back on him…Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright”. Here the “is…was” juxtaposition helps generate the perception that the woman on whom the artist based this portrait has been subjected to time; her portrait, as a representation, has not.
