Adapting the Decameron: The Rebellious Artistry in Keats’s “Isabella” and Millais’s Isabella

Abstract

In his classic book The Sister Arts (1958), Jean H. Hagstrum conceives of poetry and painting as the sister arts immersed in the distinctly neoclassical styles of the eighteenth-century tradition. However, he does not extend his renowned thesis into the Romantic period. Assertion of the close relationship between literature and the visual arts—ut pictura poesis— from its early ancient Roman reference by Horace, and on through the Renaissance, diminished after the mid-eighteenth century, when Lessing published Laocoön arguing the limits of painting and poetry, and Burke emphasized the sublime effect of obscurity in poetry rather than the clarity and immediacy of painting. Yet, the association of the two forms was re-established in and beyond the Romantic period, in which John Keats’s poetry had a profound effect on the Pre-Raphaelite artists. The Romantic poet and the Victorian artists, respectively, declared their disinheritance from eighteenth-century neoclassicism and the dogmas of the Royal Academy, both of which prominently embraced the tradition of classical art theory.

  This paper will recentralize the period’s interrelation of literature and visual art in a comparison of Keats’s adaptation of Boccaccio’s Decameron in “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil” (1818) and John Everett Millais’s Isabella (1848–49). I will focus on the medievalism and the prominent visual details in both works, highlighting in Keats the radical indictment of Isabella’s two brothers in their exploitation and repression of contemporary laborers by examining the extraordinary visual image in the compound phrase “many once proud-quiver’d loins.” Keats’s poetic hostility to growing financial dominance is analogous to Millais’s antipathy in his representation of Isabella’s family, where the themes of commercial greed, self-absorbed lovesickness and feigned politeness are rendered in intense and actual detail to fully repudiate the dominant academic tradition in painting. Therefore, the close relationship between Keats’s and Millais’s works lies most significantly in the intensity of immediate details against the neoclassical claim of ideal wholeness integrated by parts.