Poet and painter, born in London, UK, the son of Gabriele Rossetti. He trained at the Royal Academy in London, and helped to form the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (c.1850), which aimed to return to pre-Renaissance art forms involving vivid colour and detail. His early work was on religious themes, such as The Annunciation (1850, Tate, London); his later manner became more secular, and more ornate in style. The death of his wife in 1862, and adverse criticism of his poetry, turned him into a recluse, but Ballads and Sonnets (1881) contains some of his best work.
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. Rossetti was born in London, England and originally named Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti. 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.
Following the exhibition of Holman Hunt's painting The Eve of St. Agnes, Rossetti sought out Hunt's friendship. Rossetti's own poem "The Blessed Damozel" was an imitation of Keats, so he believed that Hunt might share his artistic and literary ideals. Rossetti was always more interested in the Medieval than in the modern side of the movement.
Nevertheless Rossetti's first major paintings display some of the realist qualities of the early Pre-Raphaelite movement.
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.
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. Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and buried the bulk of his unpublished poems in her grave at Highgate Cemetery.
These paintings were to be a major influence on the development of the European Symbolist movement.
During this time, Rossetti acquired an obsession for exotic animals, and in particular wombats.
During these years, Rossetti was prevailed upon by friends to exhume his poems from his wife's grave. 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.
Rossetti also typically wrote sonnets for his pictures, such as "Astarte Syraica".
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.
Artworks by Rossetti
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Ecce Ancilla Domini! 1850 |
Persephona, 1873-1877, Tate Gallery, Londre |
Beata Beatrix, 1863 |
Astarte Syriaca, 1877, City Art Gallery, Manchester |
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The Roseleaf, 1865 |
Ilustration for Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), first book of poems by Christina Rossetti, Rossetti's sister |
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