Mnemosyne

mnemosyne

Via Theoi.com:

MNEMOSYNE was Titan goddess of memory and remembrance and the inventress of language and words.

As a Titan daughter of Ouranos (Heaven), Mnemosyne was also a goddess of time. She represented the rote memorisation required, before the introduction of writing, to preserve the stories of history and sagas of myth. In this role she was represented as the mother of the Mousai (Muses), originally patron goddesses of the poets of the oral tradition.

Finally Mnemosyne was a minor oracular goddess like her sister-Titanes. She presided over the underground oracle of Trophonios in Boiotia.

 

Once again, we see Jane Morris as a goddess.  A goddess whose domain is memory and time.  Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted Mnemosyne in the 1870s, a time when he was in love with Jane.  I believe that this may have been originally designed as Astarte Syriacabut here she is as Memory with her lamp.  Can we read this as an attempt to metaphorically preserve the memory of their relationship?  Rossetti was deeply troubled at this stage, perhaps there was a need to hang on to what he believed made him happy in an effort to block out the memories that pained him.  Or perhaps he felt he could never be free of the memories that haunted him; I find the lines he included with the frame quite telling:

Is Memory most of miseries miserable,
Or the one flower of ease in bitterest hell? (Dante Gabriel Rossetti)

mnemosyne-hollyer

Mnemosyne is part of the collection at the Delaware Art Museum.

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