Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti (12 May 1828 – 9 April 1882), generally known as Dante Gabriel Rossetti ( ; ), was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. Rossetti inspired many contemporary artists and writers, such as Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Morris, and Edward Burne-Jones. His work also influenced the European Symbolists and was a major precursor of the Aesthetic movement.
Rossetti's art was characterised by its sensuality and its mediaeval revivalism. His early poetry was influenced by John Keats and William Blake. He frequently wrote sonnets to accompany his pictures, spanning from The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) and Astarte Syriaca (1877), while also creating art to illustrate poems such as Goblin Market by his sister Christina Rossetti.
Rossetti's personal life was closely linked to his work, especially his relationships with his models and muses, including Elizabeth Siddal (whom he married), Fanny Cornforth, and Jane Morris.
Early life
thumb|Self-portrait, 1847
Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti was born, at 38 Charlotte Street, Portland Place in London, on 12 May 1828. His father was the émigré Italian scholar Gabriele Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti, and his mother was Frances Mary Lavinia Polidori, the daughter of a Tuscan scholar of Greek descent, Gaetano Polidori. The writer and physician John William Polidori was Rossetti's maternal uncle.
Rossetti’s family and friends called him Gabriel, but in publications he favoured the name Dante. He had three siblings: the poet Christina Rossetti, the critic William Michael Rossetti, and the author Maria Francesca Rossetti. His father was a lapsed Roman Catholic and his mother was an Anglican: Gabriel was baptised as Anglican.
The household was a bohemian environment, with frequent visits by Italian artists, scholars, adventurers and revolutionaries, and the children, including Gabriel, were educated together at home by their mother, who was an important influence on all of them and taught them the works of Dante and Petrarch.
Rossetti went on to attend King's College School in its original location near the Strand in London. He read the Bible, along with the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, and Lord Byron. In his teens he discovered the work of Dante Aligheri, whose Vita Nuova he went on to translate.
The youthful Rossetti is described as "self-possessed, articulate, passionate and charismatic" but also "ardent, poetic and feckless". Like all his siblings, he aspired to be a poet. He also wished to be a painter, having shown a great interest in Medieval Italian art. He studied at Henry Sass' Drawing Academy from 1841 to 1845, when he enrolled in the Antique School of the Royal Academy, which he left in 1848. After leaving the Royal Academy, Rossetti studied under Ford Madox Brown, with whom he retained a close relationship throughout his life.
Following the exhibition of William Holman Hunt's painting The Eve of St. Agnes, Rossetti sought out Hunt's friendship. The painting illustrated a poem by John Keats. Rossetti's own poem, "The Blessed Damozel", was an imitation of Keats, and he believed Hunt might share his artistic and literary ideals. Together they developed the philosophy of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group they founded along with John Everett Millais.
The group's intention was to reform English art by rejecting what they considered to be the mechanistic approach first adopted by the Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphael and Michelangelo and the formal training regime introduced by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Their approach was to return to the abundant detail, intense colours, and complex compositions of Quattrocento Italian and Flemish art. Their technique involved the use of pure colours on a white background, and they also often painted outdoors for maximum authenticity.
The critic John Ruskin wrote:
For the first issue of the brotherhood's magazine, The Germ, published early in 1850, Rossetti contributed his poem, "The Blessed Damozel", and a story about a fictional early Italian artist inspired by a vision of a woman who bids him combine the human and the divine in his art.
Career
thumb|[[The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849). The models were the artist's mother for Saint Anne and his sister Christina for the Virgin.]]
Beginnings
Rossetti's first major oil paintings display the realist qualities of the early Pre-Raphaelite movement. His Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) and Ecce Ancilla Domini! (1850) portray Mary as a teenage girl. William Bell Scott saw Girlhood in progress in Hunt's studio and remarked on young Rossetti's technique:
Stung by criticism of his second major painting, Ecce Ancilla Domini, exhibited in 1850, and the "increasingly hysterical critical reaction that greeted Pre-Raphaelitism" that year, Rossetti turned to watercolours, which could be sold privately. Although his work subsequently won support from John Ruskin, Rossetti rarely exhibited thereafter.
His visions of Arthurian romance and mediaeval design also inspired William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Neither Burne-Jones nor Morris knew Rossetti, but were much influenced by his works, and met him by recruiting him as a contributor to their Oxford and Cambridge Magazine which Morris founded in 1856 to promote his ideas about art and poetry.
In February 1857, Rossetti wrote to William Bell Scott: