Born in Birmingham in 1833 and educated at Exeter College, Oxford, Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones is, in many ways, an archetypal Victorian artist. He allied himself to the tenets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, forged a lasting personal and creative connection with William Morris, and flirted with Aestheticism.

It is also the case that Burne-Jones's work unveils the complexity of aesthetic and social attitudes as the nineteenth century progressed. In particular, Burne-Jones's changing depictions of the human body reveal the unstable, uncertain and ambiguous ways in which Victorian bodies were sites of exploration, transcendence and desire.

Burne-Jones's story begins in earnest in the early 1850s as an undergraduate at Oxford. It was here that he met William Morris and, alongside a group of friends from Birmingham, became informed by the writings of John Ruskin, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Thomas Malory. The friends referred to themselves as the 'Brotherhood' – an allusion to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who, in 1848, had been founded by a cast of young artists, poets and writers including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais.

These groups collided and crystallised their allegiance to Ruskin, medievalism, literature and 'truth to nature'. These Pre-Raphaelite influences are evident in The Backgammon Players (1861).

The drawing is an experiment in the possibility of the medium. Pencil enabled Burne-Jones to explore tonal contrast, and intricate and exceptional detail. In its precise and detailed depiction of the natural world, its deployment of historical scenes and dress, and decorative elements, it reflects neatly the interests of Ruskin's acolytes.

Childe Roland (1861) depicts the titular hero of Robert Browning's poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. Published in 1855, and introduced to Burne-Jones in 1856, the poem draws its title from a line in William Shakespeare's King Lear and describes, from Roland's perspective, an arduous and horrific quest toward an ominous Dark Tower.

Disturbed by the barren and apocalyptic scenes he sees along the way, Roland finally arrives at the Tower where the poem abruptly ends, leaving the young knight's fate unknown. Burne-Jones describes this moment of arrival.

The structure sits at the top-right corner of the composition. It is looming and uncertain, but its full terror is obscured by a riot of sunflowers. Each meticulous detail – every petal, seed and stem – has been described in pen by Burne-Jones with absolute clarity and accuracy. Flowers, of course, are never neutral in Victorian art. The flowers' association with the sun, as well as the myth of Clytie and Apollo, suggests loyalty, adoration and vitality.

But it is also the case that the colour yellow had allusions to sickness, cowardice and shame. While Burne-Jones perhaps evades some of this association through his choice of medium, the possibility of duality in the flowers' meaning reflects the ambiguity and uncertainty of Browning's verse.

Regardless of their meaning, the brightness of the flowers stands in sharp contrast to the dark, sombre and almost murky quality of the titular character's armour. While the drawing suggests fluidity, the smoky blacks and greys of the knight's armour are monolithic. They seem to absorb and take over the young knight's form, creating an impassable barrier between him and the natural world.

It is this binary between humanity and the world that was interrogated by Burne-Jones as the 1860s progressed. Inspired by Michelangelo, Burne-Jones sought to draw how the Renaissance Master sculpted, with its anatomical accuracy yet unapologetic tactility.

An 1878 sketch, Studies of Hands with Musical Instruments for 'The Golden Stairs' epitomises this – in the sketch, Burne-Jones demonstrates his prowess while emphasising the haptic and sensuous potential of hands as they hold, pluck and caress their instruments.

Bones of the Human Hand and Wrist, and of the Elbow Joint (recto); Head of a Man (verso)

Michelangelo's prioritisation of the nude in particular drew Burne-Jones’ attention and allowed him to express not only the fullness of his artistic talents but a conceptual shift away from Ruskinism.

In the 1868 sketch Seraph (study for Le Chant d'Amour), the nude is drawn from the highest order of Christian celestial hierarchy; his spiritual purity is echoed in his physical perfection, his gentle muscularity suggests a delight in the body.

The body here is suggestive of a more erotic potential than Ruskinism would allow, but also moves beyond the violence and physical prowess associated with the male form as depicted in, for example, Frederic Leighton's Athlete Struggling with Python.

In its youth and delicacy, Seraph also begins to hint at the androgyny and homoeroticism present in aesthetic allegiances to the Renaissance.

The 1867 drawing Cupid Delivering Psyche, which takes a passage from the poem The Earthly Paradise, by Morris, affirms this. Psyche kneels, enraptured by both Cupid's arms and robe. Their flesh, clinging to one another, is announced as separate only in tone, their bodily edges blurred by love.

Psyche, although bare-breasted, possesses an angularity and structure in her face that echoes her paramour. Cupid, for his part, is muscled and strong, but not brutish, in a similar way to Seraph. While both figures are clothed, the diaphanous textiles evoke the fleshly desire beneath – Psyche's dress comes to a provocative cluster at the top of her thighs; Cupid's robe extends around both figures as a suggestion of sexual desire.

The subject was likely chosen by Burne-Jones as an attempt to allegorise his affair with Maria Zambaco. Zambaco had escaped an unhappy marriage and Burne-Jones, although married to his wife Georgiana since 1860, likely found affinity with Cupid's role as saviour.

This evolution in Burne-Jones's practice was not isolated, nor was it solely biographical. Indeed, aesthetic ideals were shifting around him. In the 1860s and early 1870s, writers including Walter Pater and Algernon Swinburne announced an artistic mode in which a pursuit of beauty infiltrated the moralising power of Ruskinism. In 1878, James McNeill Whistler infamously sued Ruskin for libel after the stalwart decried the artist for 'flinging a pot of paint in the public's face'.

Swinburne's poem Anactoria, published in 1866, draws on Sappho's 'Ode to Anactoria', a fragment in which the Greek poet describes her carnal homoerotic desire.

Swinburne's metapoem binds lust and fleshly desire with an artistic longing for perfection. In Swinburne's hands, transitory earthly pleasures fuel creation and, as such, can enable a sort of artistic immortality.

Swinburne's poem, and the collection Poems and Ballads in which it was published, engaged extensively with such subjects. Homosexuality, carnality and pleasure abound. In its controversy, it became hugely popular. The collection was dedicated to Burne-Jones and was overt in drawing its inspiration from the artist's oeuvre.

This aesthetic ideal transcended art from the neoclassicism of Leighton to the sensuality of Rossetti. Burne-Jones's 1870 painting of Cupid Delivering Psyche announces this fleshliness more precisely.

Psyche's nudity has been obscured by a suggestion of robes; in turn, this dissolves into the textiles that embrace and envelop the pair. Tactile boundaries are increasingly erased here; flesh shines through fabric, bodies seem to become one, and the edges of those bodies blur into their surroundings. The painting evokes, clearly, the transformative potential of bodily union.

The ability of the body to dissolve and transcend was not reserved solely for the erotic. Caroline Arscott has described how armour in Burne-Jones's oeuvre acts as an extension of the skin; this is evident in The Rock of Doom.

Here, Perseus's glistening, purple armour sits as leathery scales atop his body. It extends the limits of his flesh, at once protecting it and pushing it forward into the world. It stands as a stark, perhaps troubling, foil to the glowing pale nakedness of the Andromeda, chained to a phallic promontory. Preparatory sketches for the series illustrate the instability of these bodily limits more clearly.

The Finding of Medusa (1882) depicts a Perseus who is at once covered and nude – layers of skin and armour meld together. Feathers, robes and earth collide and connect each figure.

In Nude Study of Perseus and the Sea Monster (1876-88), the hero is locked in battle with a serpentine adversary.

The monster's sinuous body encircles and entombs Perseus. The texture of its flesh echoes its victor's armour and, at moments, seems to extend impossibly. The hero clutches the monster's neck, explicitly connecting both beings.

In Burne-Jones's hands, the body served as much more than simply an expression of technical skill. It provided an opportunity to explore its limitations and its porosity, its carnality and spirituality, its binary and its androgyny.

Frances Varley, art historian

This content was funded by the Bridget Riley Art Foundation

Further reading

Caroline Arscott, 'Burne-Jones: The Perseus Series' in William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings, Yale University Press, 2008

J. B. Bullen, The Pre-Raphaelite Body: Fear and Desire in Painting, Poetry and Criticism, Clarendon Press, 1998

Adele M. Ernstrom, 'Elizabeth Eastlake v. John Ruskin: The Content of Idea and the Claims of Art' in Revue d'art canadienne, 37:2, 2012

Linda Merrill, A Pot of Paint: Aesthetics on Trial in Whistler v. Ruskin, Smithsonian University Press, 1992

Adrienne Auslander Munich, Andromeda's Chains: Gender and Interpretation in Victorian Literature and Art, Columbia University Press, 1989

Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, Sexuality, Routledge, 1992

Lena Østermark-Johansen, 'Michelangelo and Burne-Jones' in Sweetness and Strength: The Reception of Michelangelo in Late-Victorian England, Routledge, 2020

Elizabeth Prettejohn, Art for Art's Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting, Yale University Press, 2007