Known also as the Song of Songs or the Canticles, the Song of Solomon was a natural choice of biblical subject for Burne-Jones, having little overt religious content but much in the way of lyrical word-painting and allegorical allusion. Described by Burne-Jones in his work record as "designs from the Song of Solomon — for painting on panel some day," a sequence of five large pencil drawings has usually been associ- ated with other designs of a vertical format, destined to be exe- cuted in needlework (see cat. no. 130), although only one such embroidery is known. 1 They are of an exceptional precision and delicacy, extending beyond even the Aeneid drawings (cat. no. 66) in the artist's meticulous delight in elaborating the loops and swirls of the drapery's clinging to even more elon- gated figures. Malcolm Bell, the artist's first biographer, identified the likely source of these hieratic figures in the fifteenth-century engravings by Baccio Baldim and Antonio Pollaiuolo after Botticelli, and especially the edition of Dante published by Niccolo di Lorenzo della Magna in 1481. 2 The two sheets now at Birmingham are the third and the last in the set. The first four subjects are devoted to Solomon's expression of love, both spiritual and sensual, for his beloved, the Bride of Lebanon, whom he finally reveals to the world. Her statuesque depiction with the symbolic representation of the winds was later converted into a huge watercolour, exhibit- ed at the New Gallery in 1891 under the title Sponsa di Libano? 1. Harrison and Waters 1973, p. 118. The other three drawings, which were exhibited at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1899 (no. 141), belonged to Frances Horner (nee Graham), who worked a number of pieces of embroidery after Burne-Jones's designs. 2. Bell 1892, p. 102. 3. Burne-Jones's idiosyncratic mixture of seriousness and humor is con- veyed by this anecdote, concerning the 18 91 watercolour: "In a letter to Lady Rayleigh there is mention of a scene with a model from whom he drew the heads of the Winds who breathe upon the garden of the Bride, 'I drew the South wind one day and the North wind the next. Such a queer little model I had, a little Houndsditch Jewess, self-possessed, mature and worldly, and only about twelve years old. When I said to her, 'Think of nothing and feel silly and look wild and blow with your lips,' she threw off Houndsditch in a moment, and she might have been born in Lebanon, instead of the Cockney which she was' " {Memorials, vol. 2, p. 215).
Memorials Vol 1 p 26 (1871) "... so that now I care most for Michael Angelo, Luca Signorelli, Mantegna, Giotto, Botticelli, Andrea del Sarto, Paolo Uccello, and Piero della Francesca." Memorials Vol 2 p 260 (1895) "I don't like parts of pictures looking as if no trouble had been taken over them. Even Michael Angelo shirks sometimes, but Botticelli never; he thinks well about it before he begins, and does what is beautiful always." An essay by Walter Pater on "Sandro Botticelli" appeared in the August 1870 number of The Fortnightly Review and was used again in his book of essays "The Renaissance" published 1873. Sponsa di Libano of 1891shares many ideas with the Birth of Venus by Botticelli. Fundamentally the two paintings are about beauty and the effect of breeze as it plays upon rippling fabric and hair. A detail Burne-Jones has taken literally from Botticelli is the scattered flowers in the air. Both allegories are based upon a beautiful maiden lost in thought. Burne-Jones has trans-located the elements found in Bottcelli's painting into an English Aesthetic scene.