Rossetti, Dante Gabriel

ROSSETTI, DANTE GABRIEL. - English painter and poet, b. in London on 12 May 1828, d. at Birchington on 9 Apr. 1882.

Son of the Italian exile Gabriele R., he was educated by his father in the cult of poetry and the figurative arts, while in the family he received an education of a frankly religious character, the latter a fundamental element for understanding also certain particular artistic attitudes of R., alongside other elements of a distinctly English character. Indeed R. is considered the major and most significant exponent of the particular English artistic movement of a romantic stamp known as Pre-Raphaelitism (v. PRERAFAELLITI). Besides his father's teaching and the cult of Dante's poetry, there contributed largely to R.'s cultural and artistic formation — a refined and highly literary artist — both the intense pre-Romantic expressiveness of the fantastic and visionary W. Blake, and, among his contemporaries, the religiosity in the works of Millais and Hunt, who were themselves part of the Pre-Raphaelite group, while from F. M. Brown R. drew the example of a certain decorative complacency reflected in linear stylizations. Nevertheless all these elements are as it were amalgamated in R.'s paintings, in which the images, which express somewhat artificial sentiments, dense with mysticism, but which are also sometimes touched by a certain morbid sensuality, are executed in a rather artificial style, even if not devoid of elegance and charm.

Among the works of sacred subject painted by R., one recalls the Infancy of the Virgin in Lady Jekyll's collection, the Ecce ancilla Domini, in the Tate Gallery in London, where the well-known Beata Beatrix (1863) is also to be found, while the famous Dream of Dante is in Liverpool in the Walker Art Gallery.

Emilio Lavagnino

LITERATURE

From his earliest youth Gabriel was influenced by Dante's works (particularly the Vita Nuova, 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 on the one hand bear the mark of his experience as a painter, and on the other are set in a heavy atmosphere of late Romanticism, in which he was deeply immersed, and are invested with a sensuality with a melancholy core that is foreign to his models. Sensuality and melancholy are precisely the typical aspects of a conflict that is not resolved in his poetry, macabre and passionate even when it is inspired by mystical subjects, just as it is not resolved in his intimate life. R. was a member of the Pre-Raphaelite group from the beginning; his best poems appear in Ballads and Sonnets (1881), which also contains The House of Life, a sequence 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 an incurable despondency).

Augusto Guidi