DANTE GABRIELE ROSSETTI. — English painter and poet, b. in London on 12 May 1828, d. at Birchington on 9 April 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 distinctly religious character, this latter element being fundamental for understanding certain particular artistic attitudes of R. as well as other elements of distinctly English character. Indeed, R. is considered the major and most significant exponent of the particular English artistic movement of romantic inspiration known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (v. PRERAFFAELLITI). In addition to his father’s teaching and his cult for Dante’s poetry, which greatly contributed to the cultural and artistic formation of R.—a refined and highly literary artist—both the intense preromantic expressiveness of the visionary and fantastic W. Blake and, among his contemporaries, the religiosity in the works of Millais and Hunt, who were part of the Pre-Raphaelite group, exerted a strong influence on him, while from F. M. Brown he drew the example of a certain decorative complacency reflected in the stylizations of blacks. However, all these elements are akin in R.’s paintings, in which the images, expressing somewhat artificial feelings, dense with mysticism, but which are also sometimes touched by a certain morbid sensuality, are rendered in a rather artificial style, though not without elegance and charm.
Among the works of sacred subject painted by R. are *The Girlhood of Mary Virgin* in the collection of Lady Jekyll, *Ecce Ancilla Domini*, in the Tate Gallery in London, where the well-known *Beata Beatrix* (1863) is also found, while the famous *Dante’s Dream* is in Liverpool at the Walker Art Gallery.
LITERATURE. — Gabriele was influenced from early youth by Dante’s works (particularly the *Vita Nuova*, which he later translated into English along with a selection from the poets of the early centuries). Although he imitates the primitives, his imitations on the one hand reflect 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 imbued with a melancholic sensuality that is foreign to his models. Sensuality and melancholy are precisely the typical aspects of a contrast that is not resolved in his poetry, which is macabre and passionate even when inspired by mystical subjects, just as it is not resolved in his intimate life. R. was a member from the beginning of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; 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 incurable despondency).
ROSSI, Bernardo Maria de’ (De Rubeis): see de Rubeis, Bernardo Maria.