Rossetti ritually commemorated the face of Elizabeth Siddal, a melancholic comsumptive who died of a laudanum ovedose shortly after he married her. Seven years later, he exhumed her corpse to rescue the sheaf of poems that, in a Romantic fit, he had buried with her. He constantly drew and painted Siddal before and after her death. It is as if the artist were in bondage to Poe's Ligeia, whose image vanquishes all living women. Like Leonardo, Rossetti was under enchantment by some archetypal original, probably a Romantic shadow of the mother.
Obsession is psychic closure, a Decadent deforming of reality.
Her frailty seemed feminine to others. Rossetti saw, as his namesake Dante did in Beatrice, the hermaphrodite remoteness of the beautiful boy, the cruel perfection of solipsistic beauty. From the brooding girl-boy Elizabet Siddal came the definitive sexual persona of all Decadent art. Italian Catholicism's vestigal paganism resurfaces in Rossetti through the impact on him of High Romantic poetry. His painting begins to drift from the Pre-Raphaelite Middle Ages toward the pagan past, a Romantic regression.