Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Enchanter of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was born on May 12, 1828, in London, into a family of remarkable intellectual and artistic intensity. His father, Gabriele Rossetti, was an Italian patriot and scholar who had fled to England; his mother, Frances Polidori, was the sister of Lord Byron’s physician. The household was one of passionate commitments—to art, to poetry, to the idea that beauty could redeem the world. Rossetti’s sister Christina would become one of the great poets of the Victorian era; his brother William would be a critic and memoirist. From childhood, Rossetti was surrounded by the conviction that art mattered.

The Founding of the Brotherhood

In 1848, at the age of twenty, Rossetti founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. The Brotherhood was a rebellion against the conventions of the Royal Academy, which they believed had become formulaic and lifeless. They called for a return to the sincerity and intensity of art before Raphael—to the bright colors, the attention to detail, the spiritual seriousness of medieval and early Renaissance painting. Their manifesto was their art: paintings that shocked the public with their vivid colors, their unidealized figures, and their willingness to take on religious and literary subjects with a new directness.

Rossetti’s early paintings—The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849), Ecce Ancilla Domini (1850)—established his themes: the sacred and the sensuous intertwined, the figure of the woman as a vessel of spiritual and erotic meaning. But his true subject was emerging. He was drawn to the poetry of Dante, whose Vita Nuova became a lifelong touchstone. He translated the Italian poets, wrote his own sonnets, and sought to create an art that would match the intensity of Dante’s vision.

The Artist of the Ideal

The decade of the 1850s was a period of transformation. Rossetti met Elizabeth Siddal, a young woman working in a hat shop, who became his model, his muse, and eventually his wife. Her face—with its long neck, its heavy-lidded eyes, its expression of remote melancholy—became the ideal of Pre-Raphaelite beauty. He painted her as Beatrice, as the Lady of Shalott, as the Virgin Mary. She was the embodiment of his search for a union of the spiritual and the sensual, the sacred and the erotic.

After Siddal’s death in 1862 from an overdose of laudanum, Rossetti’s work took on a new intensity. He buried his unpublished poems with her, exhumed them years later, and returned to painting with a fevered energy. His later works—Beata Beatrix (1864–1870), The Blessed Damozel (1871–1878), Proserpine (1874)—are among his most powerful. The women in these paintings are no longer merely models; they are incarnations of loss, longing, and the unattainable.

Influence

Rossetti’s influence on his contemporaries was immediate and profound. William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, his co-founders of the Brotherhood, absorbed his commitment to sincerity and his defiance of convention. But it was the generation that followed that fully understood his achievement.

Edward Burne-Jones, who met Rossetti in 1856, became the inheritor of his vision. Burne-Jones’s paintings—with their dreamlike figures, their medieval settings, their spiritual and erotic ambiguity—carried Rossetti’s sensibility into the Aesthetic movement. William Morris, who met Rossetti at the same time, absorbed his love of medieval art and his belief that beauty should be integrated into everyday life. Morris’s decorative arts, his poetry, his socialist politics—all were shaped by the ideals Rossetti had articulated.

Rossetti’s influence extended beyond painting. His poetry, collected in Poems (1870), was a scandal and a sensation. Swinburne, the younger poet, acknowledged his debt; the decadent movement of the 1890s traced its lineage to Rossetti’s fusion of the sacred and the sensual. Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings, with their sinuous lines and their exploration of the erotic, owe a debt to Rossetti’s later works.

Legacy

Dante Gabriel Rossetti died on April 9, 1882, at the age of fifty-three, in the house in Birchington-on-Sea where he had retreated to escape the pressures of London. He left behind a body of work that had transformed Victorian art. He had been, in the words of a contemporary, “the great enchanter of the age”—an artist who believed that beauty was not decoration but salvation, who sought in the faces of women and the lines of poetry a vision of the divine. His influence extends forward: through the Symbolists, the Decadents, the Aesthetic movement, and into the twentieth century. He remains one of the most original and influential figures in the history of British art, the painter who, more than any other, defined the Victorian imagination.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti – Virtual Museum