During the 1860's Burne-Jones's favourite professional male model, di Marco, also sat for Walter Crane. In Time Was, W Graham Robertson recounted Mrs. Crane's edict: The Venus, the larger canvas of the two, was the supreme effort, and prayers had been put up to the Olympian Frederic Leighton that he should descend to Shepherd's Bush and pronounce upon it; which he had duly done according to his good-natured custom. I did not then hear his criticism, but learned later on (and elsewhere) that he had delivered himself thus “But my dear fellow, that is not Aphrodite - that's Alessandro!” Alessandro being a well-known male model who had in fact materially assisted in the genesis of the Anadyomene. For alas, the fiat of domestic authority had gone forth against female models as being neither necessary nor desirable additions to a young artist's equipment, and thus Walter Crane's goddess showed a blending of the sexes which was mystically correct but anatomically surprising. Still she was a fine, upstanding slip of a boy, and in the clear sunlit atmosphere and the charming colour scheme of ivory, blue and almond she passed for Venus pleasantly enough, and later on, finding grace in the eyes of G F Watts, the painter, she hung for many years on the stairway of Little Holland House.
A favourite Italian model of the 1870-80s whose features can be recognised as Perseus in The Perseus Series.
Sotheby's CATALOGUE NOTE 2018 Alessandro di Marco was a former organ-grinder from Piedmont in Italy who appears to have first modelled for Frederic Leighton as a small child in Rome in 1853 for Cimabue's Madonna (Royal Collection, on long-term loan to the National Gallery, London) and seems to have made his way to the ateliers of Paris. William Blake Richmond described him as; '... a man who seemed to stride out from Signorelli's grand frescoes... a fellow so graceful and of such a colour, a kind of bronze gold, having a skin of so fine a texture that the movement of every muscle was not disguised, not a film of fat disfigured his shapely limbs. Only a peasant, people say! Yes--but of a race of Kings--so noble he looked.' (Simon Reynolds, William Blake Richmond, p.45) By the late 1860s he was modelling in London for Richmond, Poynter, Leighton, Legros, Solomon and the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. He was also the model for a beautiful drawing of Dante for Dante’s Dream by Rossetti (sold in these rooms, 14 July 2016, lot 17) but perhaps his most remarkable appearance was as the principal figure in The Renaissance of Venus (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) by Walter Crane, whose wife forbid him to study female models. Principal pictures by Burne-Jones for which Alessandro is believed to have sat include The Beguiling of Merlin of 1872-7 (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight) and Love Among the Ruins (Christie's, London, 11 July 2013, lot 3) with which the present drawing has been associated. However the study seems more likely to be for The Pilgrim at the Gate of Idleness (Dallas Museum of Art) completed in 1884 as one of the series of pictures illustrating the story of the Romaunt of the Rose.