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D(ante) G(abriel) Rossetti (1828-1882) - original name Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti | |
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Brother of poet Christina Rossetti, painter and poet too, who was in the 1840s one of the founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Although the movement started to lose its attraction by the mid-1850s, new disciples Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris brought with them fresh enthusiasm. Rossetti's poems are distinguished by fantasy, leading the reader to times past, to medieval colour, Arthurian legend, and Dantesque mysticism. I have been here before, Dante Gabriel Rosetti was born in London, the son of the poet Gabriele Rossetti (1783-1854), and Frances Mary Lavinia Polidori Rossetti, sister of Byron's physician, Dr. John Polidori. Thus Rossetti's background was essentially Italian; Gabriele had emigrated to England mainly for political reasons. In the cultural atmosphere of his home, already as a child he became interested in romantic literature. From 1836 to 1843 he studied at King's College School, London. Between the years 1843 and 1846 he attended Cary's Art Academy, and entered in 1848 the Royal Academy, where he spent an unfruitful period. However, he also started to write 'The House of Life', a sequence of 102 sonnets, which is considered his masterpiece. In it he wrote: "A Sonnet is a moment's monument, - Memorial from the Soul's eternity / To one dead deathless hour. ..." Rossetti founded in 1848 with John Everett Millais, Holman Hunt, and others the short-lived but influential Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which received rough treatment from the critics. Rosssetti and his friends rejected Victorian materialism, admired the works of early Italian artists, and wanted to bring back into art a pre-Renaissance purity of style and spirit. For many years Rossetti was known only as a painter. On the other hand he had to face for some time the problem that his paintings were not bought. He idealized his subjects, and used literary themes of medieval romances. His early poems, such as 'The Blessed Damozel', a highly symbolic work, and 'My Sister's Sleep', in which death visits a family on a Christmas Eve, were published in the Pre-Raphaelite magazine The Germ in 1850. "I said, "Full knowledge does not grieve: / This which upon my spirit dwells / Perhaps would have been sorrow else: / But I am glad 'tis Christmas Eve." (from 'My Sister's Sleep') The publication survived for only four issues. Rossetti enjoyed a modest success as a writer when his translations in THE EARLY ITALIAN POETS appeared in 1861. Also the art critic Ruskin started to buy his paintings and spread Rossetti's reputation. In most of Rossetti's early pictures his ideal ladies were portraits of his wife, the beautiful Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal. He had met her in 1850, and they married in 1860 when she was already in poor health. Rossetti encouraged Elizabeth's own painting and writing aspirations. She modelled for him and for many of his circle - perhaps the most impressive portrait is the drowned Ophelia in Millais's painting. Another famous painting is La Ghirlandata, is which a young woman plays a harp, not Siddal, but Alexa Wilding. May Morris, the daughter of William and Jane Morris, modelled for the two angels who listen to her. After his wife died of an overdose of laudanum in 1862, Rossetti buried with her the only complete manuscript of his poems. The manuscript was recovered seven years later and published in 1870. It included most of his best verse and established his reputation as a poet. Although Rossetti had not been faithful to Elizabeth, her loss left an increasing sadness in his work. A Sonnet is a moment's monument - In 1868 Rossetti showed renewed interest in poetry. Sixteen sonnets, including the 'Willowwood' sequence, were published in The Fortnightly Review in 1869. He had a close relationship with Jane Morris, wife of the painter William Morris, and wrote the ballad 'Rose Mary'. In 1871 there appeared R. Buchanan's pamphlet 'The Fleshy School of Poetry' in the Contemporary Review, in which Rossetti and his associates were accused of obscenity. Rossetti's reply, 'The Stealthy School of Criticism', appeared in The Athenaeum in 1872. Though he was admired by a younger generation of aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde, Rossetti's later years were shadowed by health problems, morbid thoughts, and paranoia. From 1869 to 1871 he painted his last important picture, Dante's Dream. In 1872 he attempted suicide. Before his death at the age of fifty-three in 1882, he published BALLADS AND SONNETS (1881). It completed with new sonnets 'The House of Life', which had appeared eleven years earlier. Rossetti's collected works appeared in 1886 in two volumes. For further reading: A Victorian Romantic by Oswald Doughty (1960); The Dark Glass by R.J.R. Howard (1972); The Pre-Raphaelite Poems by L. Stevenson (1972); Four Rossettis by S. Weintraub (1977); Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Friends and Enemies by Helen Rossetti Angeli (1977); Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter and Man of Letters by Frank V. Rutter (1978); Life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti by Joseph Knight (1987); Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poet and Painter by Eben E. Bass (1990); Critical Essays on Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. by David G. Riede (1992); Dante Gabriel Rossetti Revisited by David G. Riede (1992); Dante Gabriel Rossetti by Alicia Craig Faxon (1994); Dante Gabriel Rossetti by Russell Ash (1995); Rossetti and His Circle by Elizabeth Prettejohn (1998); Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game That Must Be Lost by Jerome J. McGann (2000); Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Poet As Craftsman by Robert N. Keane (2002) - See also: John Keats, Volter Kilpi - Note: Rossetti illustrated an edition of Alfred Tennyson's Poems (1857). The most widely known of his translations are the three from Villon, especially the Ballad of Dead Ladies, and Dante's Vita Nuova. - Gabriele Rossetti: works include Dante Commedia (1826), Lo Spirito antipapale che produssela Riforma (1832), Poems (1833), La Beatrice Dante (1842), Il veggente in solitudine (1846), L'arpa evangelica (1852). Selected writings:
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