Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was born 12 May 1828 in London. He was described as
self-possessed, articulate, passionate and charismatic. His parents, Italian
expatriates, were Gabriele Rossetti, a Dante scholar who had been exiled from
Naples for writing poetry in support of the Neapolitan Constitution of 1819, and
Frances Polidori, who had trained as a governess and supervised her children's
early education. His sister was Christina Georgina Rossetti, one of the most
important English poets in the 19th century.
He was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator, but throughout his
career, he focused on painting. As a child, he intended to be a painter and he
illustrated literary subjects in his earliest drawings. The first major paintings of
Rossetti display the realist qualities of the early Pre-Raphaelite movement. In
1849 he painted his first canvas inspired by ancient Italian painters, Girlhood of
Mary Virgin. The next year he painted Ecce Ancilla Domini, a representation of
the Annunciation that exalted purity.
He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt
and John Everett Millais. The group's intention was to reform English art by
rejecting the mechanistic approach first adopted by the Mannerist artists who
succeeded Raphael and Michelangelo. Their approach was to return to the
abundant detail, intense colours, and complex compositions
of Quattocento Italian and Flemish art.
During this Brotherhood, Rossetti met Elizabeth Siddal, an important model for
the Pre-Raphaelite painters and she became his muse and his passion. They
were married in 1860. But sadly, she died of an overdose of laudanum in
1862. Rossetti became depressed and, on her death, he buried his unpublished
poems with her at Highgate Cemetery, although he later had them dug up. He
idealised her image as Dante's Beatrice in a number of paintings, such as Beata
Beatrix.
Concluding, Rossetti unfortunately started suffering a mental breakdown in
1872, because of his wife’s death and the critics to his collection of poetry.
Toward the end of his life, he sank into a morbid state, a drug addiction and his
mental instability was increasing. He spent his last years as a recluse at Cheyne
Walk. But finally, he died in 1882 at the country house of a friend, where he had
gone in a vain attempt to recover his health.
Esther Sáez Cuesta 1ºA