Isabella and the Pot of Basil

Isabella and the Pot of Basil is a painting completed in 1868 by the English artist William Holman Hunt depicting a scene from John Keats's poem Isabella, or the Pot of Basil. It depicts the heroine Isabella caressing the basil pot in which she had buried the severed head of her murdered lover Lorenzo.

Hunt had drawn an illustration of the poem in 1848, shortly after the foundation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Still, he had not developed it into a completed painting. The drawing portrayed a very different scene, depicting Lorenzo as a clerk at work while Isabella's brothers study their accounts and order around underlings.

Shortly after his marriage, Hunt returned to the poem in 1866, when he began to paint several erotically charged subjects. His sensuous painting Il Dolce far niente (roughly translated: the sweetness of doing nothing) had sold quickly, and he conceived the idea for…

摘自英文维基百科「Isabella and the Pot of Basil」（CC BY-SA 4.0），暂时没有中文条目。