Rossetti

On April 10, 1882, British poet and painter Rossetti passed away.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (May 12, 1828 - April 10, 1882) was an English painter, poet, illustrator, and translator.

Born in London, England, the son of Gabriele Rossetti, an Italian scholar, his first name was Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti. His friends and family called him "Gabriel," but in public he used the name Dante because of its association with the famous writer Dante. He was the brother of the poet Christina Rossetti and the painter William Michael Rossetti, and one of the three founders of the Pre-Raphaelite school. The other two were John Everett Milles and William Holman Hunt.

In his youth, he showed an interest in literature, and like his siblings, he wanted to be a poet. But he also wanted to be a painter, and was very interested in medieval Italian art. He then became a student of Ford Madox Brown, with whom he maintained a close relationship for the rest of his life.

Rossetti and Hunt became close friends after seeing an exhibition of Holman Hunt's paintings of The Eve of St. Agnes. Hunt illustrated poems by the then unknown poet John Keats, and Rossetti himself had written imitations of Keats, so he believed Hunt shared his views on art and literature. Together, they developed the Pre-Raphaelite school, and Rossetti always preferred medieval art to modern art. He translated and published Dante and other medieval Italian poets, and his art is thought to contain early Italian styles.

However, Rossetti's main paintings are representative of realism in the early days of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. His Girlhood of Mary, Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini depict Mary as a haggard and repressed maiden. His only paintings of modern life are the unfinished "Found," which depicts a country boy on a market trip who recognizes his former lover, only to find that she has become a prostitute and angrily grabs her. In any case, Rossetti increasingly favors symbolic and mythological portraits rather than real subjects. This is also consistent with his later expressions in poetry.

His artistic and literary development was deeply influenced by events in life, especially the death of his wife Elizabeth Siddal. She died after taking too much laudanum after giving birth to a dead baby. Rossetti became increasingly depressed and buried a large number of unpublished poems in front of her cemetery. He imagined Sidell as Dante's unrequited love and painted many works with Beatrice Portinari.

In these paintings, which influenced later European Symbolism movements, Rossetti's depictions of women were almost overly formatted. His housekeeper, Fanny Cornforth, became his new lover, whom he depicted as a symbol of carnal sexuality, while William Morris's wife, Jane Morris, became his other mistress, and was depicted as a Muse in the sky.

During this time, Rossetti became fascinated by exotic animals, especially the Wombat. He often invited friends to meet at the Wombat's Den at London Zoo, where he would watch the wombat himself for hours. In September 1869, he finally acquired a wombat, a short-lived wombat nicknamed "Top", which he often brought to the table to sleep in the center of the table during dinner. This anecdote is said to have inspired Louis Carroll to create the Hazel Dormouse character in Alice in Wonderland.

During these years, Rossetti was persuaded by friends to dig up the manuscripts of the poems he had buried in his wife's grave and published them in 1871. The pornographic nature of these poems has caused considerable controversy and has been criticized as "sensual poems." In the sonnet The House of Life, which describes the development of intimate relationships physically and spiritually, one of the passages "Nuptial Sleep" describes a man and woman falling asleep after sexual intercourse. Rossetti describes the sonnet as composed of "a remembrance of the 'moment'", implying the feeling of that moment and reminding people of what he describes. The House of Life is a series of relationships that describe this "moment"-carefully designed and placed mosaics in the most intense descriptions. This became Rossetti's main literary achievement.

Rossetti also wrote sonnets for his paintings, such as Astarte Syraica. As a designer, he and William Morris created many patterns for decorative glass and other things. Rossetti was affected by drug addiction in the last few years of her life and her body gradually weakened. He died in Kent, England in 1882.