Dante Gabriel Rossetti—art meets poetry

June 21, 2016May 13, 2023 David James paintings, Rossetti, women

Dante Gabriel Rossetti—even his name is a work of art.

It is said that to understand him, we must first understand that although he is best remembered for his paintings, he was first and foremost a poet.

O lay your lips against your hand
And let me feel your breath through it,
While through the sense your song shall fit
The soul to understand.

Early life

Born in London to an English mother and Italian father in 1828, Rossetti’s childhood was suffused in the atmosphere of medieval Italy. As a literary scholar, his father obsessed over the works of Dante and spoke mostly Italian.

Home schooled, Rossetti often read the Bible, along with the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, and William Blake. He became fascinated with the Gothic horror stories of Edgar Allan Poe.

These influences would become a major source of artistic inspiration for Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti in his early twenties

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Attending preparatory art school followed by the Royal Academy, Rossetti soon grew tired of the mechanistic approach to teaching and preferred to stay at home painting what he desired.

He saw early Victorian art as trivial, sentimental and unimaginative and yearned for a return to pre-Renaissance purity of style and aim.

When in 1848 he met William Holman Hunt, an artist who shared the same ideals, they formed a movement called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood along with fellow artist John Everett Millais.

The brotherhood believed that Renaissance artist Raphael’s Classical compositions had corrupted academic teaching of art. They felt it was time to bring back the abundant detail, intense colors and complex compositions of Quattrocento Italian art that predated Raphael, hence the name “Pre-Raphaelite”.

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Feminine Beauty

Poetry and image are closely intertwined in Rossetti’s work. Appreciating female beauty through art was sacred to him. In both poetry and painting, he explored his own fantasies and conceptions about earthly and spiritual love through the theme of female beauty.

In 1850, Rossetti met Elizabeth Siddal, who would become an important model for the Pre-Raphaelite painters. First spotted by a friend in a London hat shop, she became Rossetti’s muse, passion, and eventually his wife.

It would be 10 years before Rossetti finally married Elizabeth after a relationship that had grown hot and cold. By this time, Elizabeth’s health had declined. She had long suffered from depression, believing with some justification that Rossetti would leave her for a younger muse.

After two failed pregnancies, it was all too much for her. She overdosed on laudanum and Rossetti found her unconscious and dying in bed.

Suicide was both illegal and immoral in the Victorian era—denying the victim a Christian burial. And so her death was ruled accidental and a suicide note burned.

Many think the melancholy in Rossetti’s Prosperine (below) reflects his own feelings of personal torment over the loss of his wife. But then many others found melancholy in all his paintings. It was part of who he was.

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Proserpine by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1882

When vain desire at last and vain regret
Go hand in hand to death, and all is vain,
What shall assuage the unforgotten pain
And teach the unforgetful to forget?

Join us in the Gallery as we listen to DeBussey’s La damoiselle élue—influenced by the life and work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.