Again, among the latest of Rossetti’s unfinished works, we have the illustration of another passage in the “Vita Nuova,” telling of Dante’s mourning for his lady’s death. “La Donna della Finestra” (“The Lady of the Window”), better known as “Our Lady of Pity,” represents the beautiful woman who looked down on Dante from a window when, as he passed weeping through the streets, and fearing lest the passers-by should mock him, he glanced up, craving for some sign of sympathy, and was consoled by her calm and pitying gaze. Sketches for this design were made in several media, but the head in the unfinished painting at Birmingham is the most perfect of the series, and in fact ranks among the finest of the female heads in all Rossetti’s single-figure pictures. The artist has caught with rare felicity the expression so acutely described by the poet:

All the depth, all the tenderness, all the heroic strength of a divine sorrow that sees the end of sorrow, shines in this full-souled face. It is the ideal of the highest womanhood, and indeed of the highest humanity; of the love that has attained to be godlike, redeeming the world by infinite compassion; a love that “hopeth all things and endureth all things,” and in whose steadfast courage lies the conquering principle of the life to be. It is the companion picture—and in some respects it is a nobler, healthier version—of “The Blessed Damozel,” leaning from the bar of heaven to console the mourner on the earth below. The love that can so take hold of immortality, bring comfort even from the gates of death, and bridge over, by the sweet persistence of its ministry, by the passionate reality of its inspiration, the gulf between the physical and the spiritual world, is the love which of old was the source of the “Vita Nuova,” and which springs anew in our own age through “Our Lady of Pity” and “The Blessed Damozel.” In such designs Rossetti has restored to us all that was best in the mediæval thought of womanhood,—adding the “ever-motherly” to the “ever-womanly” of the Hellenic model, and the Divine Motherhood to the Divine Fatherhood of the Christian ideal; and enriched it with the whole wealth of psycho-sensuous beauty brought over from the region of romance. And in this consummation is justified the verdict of Ruskin: that “Rossetti was the chief intellectual force in the establishment of the modern romantic school in England.”