The fairest words on truest lips : the Italian translations of Elizabeth Siddal's pre-Raphaelite poems

Abstract

"One of the most fervent passions is the genius's love of truth." The meditation by Pierre-Simon Laplace, employed as the epigraph to Julia Kristeva's Hannah Arendt, aptly summarises the brilliance of Elizabeth Siddal's genius, always striving to achieve artistic truth and originality. Like Christina Rossetti, Siddal is a minor Pre-Raphaelite woman artist who distinguished herself for reclaiming a veritable place for women · within a patriarchal tradition of poetry. Her painterly and lyrical works which, in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's words, disclose "a real genius [ ... ] in conception and colour", are imbued with a certain truth of feminine experience. Pippa Passes (1854), The Ladies' Lament from the Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens (1856), Clerk Saunders (1857), Lady Clare (1857), Lady Affixing a Pennant to a Knight's Spear (1858) are only a few pictorial examples of how Siddal tried to document the truth of women's condition or women's experiences to oppose the falsehood of sexist stereotypes of women.