on the Spanish American literary movement of the nineteenth cen tury, Modernismo. The Spanish critic Juan Valera in his "Prologue" to Rub?n Dar?o's seminal A , ... referred to the "Parisian spirit" (41) that pervaded the book and called it "mental gallicism" (62).1 Yet, although we know that the Nicaragu?n Dar?o and the Colombian Jos? Asuncion Silva much admired the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood (Saporta Sternbach 38), litde has been said about it as a source of Modernista inspiration. Perhaps this oversight is due to the fact that it is not known which Pre-Raphaelite paintings or writings influenced the Modernistas and that Pre-Raphaelitism is an English artistic move ment that started earlier than Modernismo, which began around 1880 and continued into the early twentieth century. These two artistic movements, however, share several characteristics that point toward a unity of taste, which is articulated with a preference for details that fill the canvas and a richness of language that pervades the page, and a conspicuous common attitude toward woman. In this essay I will compare the representation of woman in a poem by Dario, "Ecce Homo" (1885), with the female imagery of one of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's female portraits, Bocca Baciata (1859). Dar?o's poem belongs to the early part of Modernismo, when aestheticism and decadentism predominated. When Dar?o praises Rossetti as the "exquisite Pre-Raphaelite" in his essay on "Max Nordau" (1905) (171), he reveals an admiration for the artist and the Pre-Raphaelites and acknowledges that they share as leaders of their movements the