Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Born Gabriel Charles, Rossetti changed his name in response to his father's studies of Dante's politico-moral allegories.  His own translations of Dante and medieval courtly love  lyrics provided sources for the iconography and metaphor in his mature work.  Studying art with Ford Madox Brown and William Holman Hut in the 1840s, Rossetti was influenced by the German Nazarenes, Durer and John Ruskin. With Brown, Hunt and John Everett Millais, Rossetti formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, revolting against neoclassical conventions in art. His first oils, The Girlhood of Mary (1849) and Ecce Ancilla Domine (aka The Annunciation, 1850), exemplify  Pre-Raphaelite flattened perspective, "fidelity to nature," typological details, mannerist figures, and illuminated colors. Despite Ruskin's support, The Germ (1848-1850), the journal of Pre-Raphaelite literature and art, which included Rossetti's aesthetic manifesto, "Hand and Soul," failed and the brother hood disbanded.

From c. 1850 to her suicide in 1862, Rossetti lived with and eventually married the poet artist, Elizabeth Siddal, his model for scene from Dante's Vita nuova, a series of watercolors on Arthurian themes, and many portrait drawings. Rossetti identified himself and Lizzie with the tragic lovers in the famous oil, Beata Beatrix (c. 1863, which shows Lizzie as Beatrice gazed upon by Dante in an ambiguous vision of "death-in-love," also a theme in Rossetti's sonnets. The eroticized Christian symbolism in Beata Beatrix also characterizes the narrator's ironic dream vision in the famous poem, "The Blessed Damozel" and its painted version. From c. 1858 onwards, Rossetti was also in love with Fanny Cornforth, the model for the "fallen woman" who rejects her fiancé's call to duty in the controversial painting Found. Rossetti's most important work of social realism, Found and its companion sonnet suggest a deep ambivalence over  sexuality, Victorian moral codes and women's rights, which also pervades the dramatic monologues , "Jenny" and "A Last Confession."

Rossetti soon became know for his book designs, picture frames, stained glass and his illustrations in Tennyson's Poems.  Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris joined Rossetti in the second phase of Pre-Raphaelitism, emphasizing a highly stylized medievalism and coordination of the literature and the arts, partly inspired by William Blake. During the late 1860's, Rossetti fell in love with Morris's wife, Jane Burden, who acted as his favorite model for the "femme fatale" type that his patrons often commissioned. Rossetti's monumental oils of dreamy or threatening women, dressed in historical costumes against decorative or mystic backgrounds, suggest his increasing difficulties with sexuality and faith in Monna Vanna (1866) and Astarte Syriaca with its sonnet.  Rossetti mastered the "double work of art" or sonnet-painting pairs, such as Lady Lilith. He poems were attacked by Robert Buchanan in the "fleshly school" controversy. Ballads and Sonnets, including the final version of the sonnet sequence, The House of Life, however, was well accepted. Celebration of the power of love-"Thy soul I know not from thy body, no/Thee from myself, nether our love from God" and of art-- the "moment's monument"--over doubt and death is central to Rossetti's work.

Dante Rossetti