ROSSETTI, DANTE GABRIELE

ROSSETTI, DANTE GABRIELE. – English painter and poet, born in London on 12 May 1828, died at Birchington on 9 April 1882.

Son of the Italian exile Gabriele R., he was educated by his father in the veneration of poetry and the figurative arts, while within the family he received an education of distinctly religious character, the latter being a fundamental element for understanding certain particular artistic attitudes of R., alongside other elements of a decidedly English character. Indeed, R. is considered the foremost and most significant exponent of the distinctive English artistic movement of Romantic inspiration known as Pre-Raphaelitism (v. PRERAFAELLITI). In addition to his father’s instruction and his veneration for Dante’s poetry, R.’s cultural and artistic formation—he was a refined and highly literary artist—was shaped to a considerable degree both by the intense pre-Romantic expressiveness of the fantastical and visionary W. Blake and, among his contemporaries, by the religious feeling in the works of Millais and Hunt, who likewise belonged to the Pre-Raphaelite group; from F. M. Brown, meanwhile, R. drew the example of a certain decorative complacency reflected in his linear stylizations. Nevertheless, all these elements appear amalgamated in R.’s paintings, in which the images, expressing somewhat artificial sentiments, steeped in mysticism but also occasionally touched by a certain morbid sensuality, are rendered in a rather artificial style, though not lacking in elegance and charm.

Among the works of sacred subject painted by R. are The Girlhood of the Virgin in the collection of Lady Jekyll, Ecce ancilla Domini, and the well-known Beata Beatrix (1863), both in London’s Tate Gallery, while the famous Dante’s Dream is in Liverpool, at the Walker Art Gallery.

LITERATURE. — From his earliest youth, Gabriele was subject to the influence of Dante’s works (particularly the Vita Nova, which he later translated into English together with a selection from the Italian poets of the early centuries). Although he imitates the primitives, his imitations are, on the one hand, marked by his experience as a painter and, on the other, set within a heavy atmosphere of late Romanticism, in which he was deeply immersed, and imbued with a sensuality of profoundly melancholy character that is foreign to his models. Sensuality and melancholy are precisely the typical aspects of a contrast that finds no resolution in his poetry, macabre and passionate even when inspired by mystical subjects, just as it finds no resolution in his inner life. From the outset R. belonged to the group of the Pre-Raphaelites; his finest poems appear in Ballads and sonnets (1881), which also contains The house of life, a series of sonnets in which the poet recalls the memories of his brief and tormented married life (his wife had died in 1862, leaving him prey to incurable despondency).