Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Selfportrait, 1847, National Portrait Gallery, London

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (May 12, 1828 – April 10, 1882) was an Italian English poet, illustrator, painter and translator.

The son of émigré Italian scholar Gabriele Rossetti, D. G. Rossetti was born in London, England and originally named Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti. His family and friends called him "Gabriel", but in publications he put the name Dante first, because of its literary associations. He was the brother of poet Christina Rossetti and the critic William Michael Rossetti and a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt.

At a very early age, he showed a strong interest in literature. Like all his siblings, he aspired to be a poet. However, he also wished to be a painter, having shown a great interest in Medieval Italian art. He studied under Ford Madox Brown, with whom he was to retain a close relationship throughout his life.

Following the exhibition of Holman Hunt's painting The Eve of St. Agnes, Rossetti sought out Hunt's friendship. The painting illustrated a poem by the then still little-known John Keats. Rossetti's own poem "The Blessed Damozel" was an imitation of Keats, so he believed that Hunt might share his artistic and literary ideals. Together they developed the philosophy of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Rossetti was always more interested in the Medieval than in the modern side of the movement. He was publishing translations of Dante and other Medieval Italian poets, and his art also sought to adopt the stylistic characteristics of the early Italians.

Nevertheless Rossetti's first major paintings display some of the realist qualities of the early Pre-Raphaelite movement. His "Girlhood of Mary, Virgin" and "Ecce Ancilla Domini" both portray Mary as an emaciated and repressed teenage girl. His incomplete picture "Found" was his only major modern-life subject. It was to have depicted a prostitute, lifted up from the street by a country-drover who recognises his old sweetheart. However, Rossetti increasingly preferred symbolic and mythological images to realistic ones. This was also true of his later poetry.

Although he won support from John Ruskin, criticism of his paintings caused him to withdraw from public exhibitions and turn to watercolours, which could be sold privately.

King Arthur's Tomb - The Last Meeting of Lancelot and Guinevere.

Subjects taken from Dante Alighieri's La Vita Nuova (which Rossetti had translated into English) and Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur inspired his art in the 1850s. His visions of Arthurian romance and medieval design also inspired his new friends of this time, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones.

Both these developments were precipitated by events in his private life, in particular by the death of his wife Elizabeth Siddal. She had taken an overdose of laudanum shortly after giving birth to a dead child. Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and buried the bulk of his unpublished poems in her grave at Highgate Cemetery. He idealised her image as Dante's Beatrice in a number of paintings, such as "Beata Beatrix".

These paintings were to be a major influence on the development of the European Symbolist movement. In these works, Rossetti's depiction of women became almost obsessively stylised. He tended to portray his new lover Fanny Cornforth as the epitome of physical eroticism, whilst another of his mistresses Jane Burden, the wife of his business partner William Morris, was glamorised as an ethereal goddess.

During this time, Rossetti acquired an obsession for exotic animals, and in particular wombats. He would frequently ask friends to meet him at the "Wombat's Lair" at the London Zoo in Regent's Park, and would spend hours there himself. Finally, in September 1869, he was to acquire the first of two pet wombats. This shortlived wombat, named "Top", was often brought to the dinner table and allowed to sleep in the large centrepiece of the dinner table during meals. Indeed, this is said to have inspired the dormouse from Lewis Caroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.[1]

During these years, Rossetti was prevailed upon by friends to exhume his poems from his wife's grave. This he did, collating and publishing them in 1871. They created a controversy when they were attacked as the epitome of the "fleshly school of poetry". The eroticism and sensuality of the poems caused offense. One poem, "Nuptial Sleep", described a couple falling asleep after sex. This was part of Rossetti's sonnet sequence The House of Life, a complex series of poems tracing the physical and spiritual development of an intimate relationship. Rossetti described the sonnet form as a "moment's monument", implying that it sought to contain the feelings of a fleeting moment, and to reflect upon their meaning. The House of Life was a series of interacting monuments to these moments — an elaborate whole made from a mosaic of intensely described fragments. This was Rossetti's most substantial literary achievement.

Rossetti also typically wrote sonnets for his pictures, such as "Astarte Syraica". As a designer, he worked with William Morris to produce images for stained glass and other decorative devices.

Toward the end of his life, Rossetti sank into a morbid state, darkened by his drug addiction and increasing mental instability, possibly worsened by his reaction to savage critical attacks on his disinterred (1869) poetry from the manuscript poems he had buried with his wife. He spent his last years as a withdrawn recluse. He died and is buried at Birchington-on-Sea, Kent, England.

Artworks by Rossetti

• 

  Ecce Ancilla Domini! 1850

• 

  Persephona, 1873-1877, Tate Gallery, Londre

• 

  Beata Beatrix, 1863

• 

  Astarte Syriaca, 1877, City Art Gallery, Manchester

• 

  The Roseleaf, 1865

• 

  Ilustration for Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), first book of poems by Christina Rossetti, Rossetti's sister

See also

• English school of painting

Additional images

• The young May Morris, 1872 (detail)
• The Blue Silk Dress, 1868
• Persephone, 1874

Sources

• Dante Gabriel Rossetti by Julian Treuherz, Liz Prettejohn and Edwin Becker (November 2003)
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Collected Writings by Jan Marsh (April 2000)
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game That Must Be Lost by Jerome McGann
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti by Russell Ash (September 1995)
• The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Vol. 1, 4 & 5 by William Fredeman
• Prelude to the Last Decade: Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the Summer of 1872 by William Fredeman

External links

• Works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Project Gutenberg
  • Project Gutenberg e-text of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The House Of Life
• The Rossetti Archive — the complete writings and pictures
• Ten Dreams Galleries
• Major Rossetti exhibition with nearly 200 works
• Website about Rossetti's wife, Elizabeth Siddal

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