Dante G. Rossetti Biography Quotes 3 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was born in London on 12 May 1828 to an Italian expatriate father, Gabriele Rossetti, a poet and Dante scholar, and an English mother, Frances Polidori. Baptized Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, he later reversed his given names and became known publicly as Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He grew up in a household steeped in literature, languages, and art. His siblings formed a gifted circle: Christina Rossetti, one of the century's most notable poets; William Michael Rossetti, a critic, diarist, and organizer; and Maria Francesca Rossetti, a scholar. On his mother's side he was linked to the Romantic circle through his uncle John Polidori, author of The Vampyre. The blend of Italian political exile culture and English letters shaped Rossetti's lifelong allegiance to medieval literature, especially Dante Alighieri, and fostered ambitions in both painting and poetry.

Training and Early Work
Rossetti's early education included study at Henry Sass's Drawing Academy and the Royal Academy Schools, though he found institutional training constraining. He sought guidance from the painter Ford Madox Brown, whose rigorous historical method and command of color left a durable impression. Rossetti's first exhibited oil paintings, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) and Ecce Ancilla Domini! (1850), announced his preference for devotional subjects, luminous color, and intimate, enclosed spaces. From the outset he treated image and word as allied arts, filling his sketchbooks with verses and his poems with painterly imagery.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
In 1848 Rossetti co-founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. The group advocated a return to the sincerity, detail, and luminous palette they associated with art before Raphael, aiming for truth to nature and to poetic sources. Other early associates included Thomas Woolner, James Collinson, F. G. Stephens, and William Michael Rossetti, who served as the Brotherhood's chronicler. The PRB published The Germ (1850), a short-lived magazine in which Rossetti's poems appeared alongside his designs. Though the Brotherhood as a formal entity soon dissolved, its ethos guided Rossetti's career: intense observation, medievalism, literary illustration, and a fusion of painting with poetry.

Elizabeth Siddal and Personal Loss
In the early 1850s Rossetti began a profound relationship with Elizabeth Siddal, a model discovered within the PRB circle who became an artist and poet in her own right. She sat for Millais's Ophelia and for many of Rossetti's works, while he encouraged her drawing and painting. The pair married in 1860. Siddal's fragile health and struggles with laudanum shadowed their years together. Her death in 1862 deeply marked Rossetti's art and verse; Beata Beatrix commemorates her through the transfigured image of Dante's Beatrice. In a famously romantic and tormented gesture, he interred the manuscript of his poems in her coffin, retrieving it in 1869 at the urging of associates including Charles Augustus Howell. The exhumation scandal hissed through the London press and scarred his sense of privacy.

Poet, Translator, and Critic
From the start Rossetti saw himself as both painter and poet. His translations, The Early Italian Poets (1861), introduced English readers to Dante Alighieri, Guido Cavalcanti, and other stilnovisti, and were later revised under the title Dante and His Circle. His own Poems (1870) established him as a major Victorian voice: The Blessed Damozel, with its vision of earthly love poised at heaven's margin; Jenny, a dramatic monologue of empathy and moral ambiguity; and the developing sonnet sequence The House of Life, which distilled desire, memory, loss, and spiritual aspiration. Ballads and Sonnets (1881) consolidated that reputation, while his critical prefaces and comments sketched a poetics of sensuous exactness and symbolic resonance.

Design, Collaboration, and the Decorative Arts
Rossetti's circle widened in the late 1850s and 1860s to include William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, both of whom he influenced decisively. He joined Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. (founded 1861), contributing stained-glass cartoons, furniture designs, and patterns that translated his poetic medievalism into domestic space. He worked with Morris and Burne-Jones on the Oxford Union murals (1857), attempting Arthurian subjects that announced a new, lyrical decorative style. These collaborations helped seed the Arts and Crafts movement, aligning beauty with craftsmanship and everyday life.

Cheyne Walk, Muses, and the Mature Style
After Siddal's death, Rossetti settled at 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, turning the house into an atelier and salon. He cultivated a distinctive pictorial idiom: rich, enamel-like color; half-length female figures against patterned grounds; and imagery drawn from myth, legend, and love lyric. Jane Burden Morris, wife of William Morris, became a central muse, modeling for works such as Proserpine, The Day Dream, and Astarte Syriaca. Through Jane's features, Rossetti refined a type of contemplative beauty that both captivated admirers and provoked debate about idealization. He continued to revisit themes of Dantean devotion in Beata Beatrix and pursued long-gestated projects like Found, an unfinished modern-life painting of moral tragedy. His circle included poets and critics such as Algernon Charles Swinburne, whose daring verse and advocacy buoyed Rossetti's literary standing.

Controversy, Illness, and Retreat
The triumph of Poems (1870) was shadowed by controversy. In 1871 Robert Buchanan attacked Rossetti's work in The Fleshly School of Poetry, accusing it of sensual excess. The public dispute wounded Rossetti, whose health was already fragile. He suffered insomnia and neuralgia and relied increasingly on chloral and alcohol, exacerbating depression and paranoia. Seeking respite, he shared the tenancy of Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire with William Morris beginning in 1871, spending periods there with Jane Morris in a retreat that nourished his art yet complicated friendships. A breakdown in 1872 led to seclusion, though he continued to paint and to refine The House of Life, many sonnets of which appeared in Ballads and Sonnets (1881).

Final Years and Death
Rossetti's final years were marked by intermittent productivity and poor health. He kept up work at Cheyne Walk, corresponded with allies including William Michael Rossetti, and defended his reputation through revised editions of his poems and translations. In 1882, seeking sea air and quiet, he went to Birchington-on-Sea, Kent, where he died on 9 April. He was buried in the churchyard of All Saints, closing a life that had braided painting, poetry, and design into a single, intensely personal vision.

Reputation and Legacy
Rossetti stands at the heart of Victorian culture as the fulcrum between Pre-Raphaelite naturalism and the symbolist, aesthetic currents that followed. His influence runs through Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris into Arts and Crafts, and, in poetry, through sonneteers who learned from The House of Life how to balance sensuality with metaphysical reach. Christina Rossetti's parallel achievement and William Michael Rossetti's curatorial labors ensured that his memory did not fade, while the storied lives of Elizabeth Siddal and Jane Morris became inseparable from his art. Despite controversy and illness, Rossetti forged a union of word and image that reshaped British painting and verse, making him one of the most consequential poet-painters of the nineteenth century.

Our collection contains 3 quotes who is written by Dante, under the main topics: Love - Art - Gratitude.