Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Authors: Andres Sophia 
Published: July 2014

Dante Gabriel Rossetti—major founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, leader of the Aesthetic movement, a key influential figure on Victorian poetry and art—is widely recognized as the Victorian poet-painter genius who defied Victorian conventions in his life and work. Rossetti’s first book, The Early Italian Poets (1861), which includes Dante’s Vita Nuova, introduced medieval Italian poetry to English audiences; a decade later in 1874 his Dante and His Circle was primarily a revision of his early book concentrating on Dante. Beginning with watercolors, inspired by medieval literary works and paintings on religious subjects, Rossetti switched in the second phase of his career to sensuous Venetian-style oil paintings of voluptuous femme fatales distinguished by their long necks, luxuriant flowing hair, and rosebud mouths. Throughout his career, Rossetti often interwove literature and art by either seeking the inspiration of his sensuous women in literature or by composing sonnets as companion pieces to the paintings. In this respect, neither the verbal (often the spiritual or psychological) nor the visual or physical, may be interpreted in isolation; the picture poem must be experienced in its totality. Unlike William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, Rossetti never exhibited, but he worked on private commissions. Dante Gabriel Rossetti has attracted innumerable Victorian, modern, and postmodern works on his poetry and painting, ranging from interpretive, biographical, psychoanalytical to sociopolitical and cultural studies, to name but a few. It is just about impossible to subsume all these works under categories that this iconoclastic genius (who resisted any limitations imposed by his critics) would possibly approve. Scholars interested in Rossetti’s poetry and prose may have access to various Victorian editions and modern collections. Comprehensive and authoritative, as well as an invaluable resource for beginning and advanced scholars, the Rossetti Archive includes his poetry, prose, correspondence, and strikingly beautiful reproductions of his drawings, watercolors, illustrations, and paintings. Rossetti’s eccentric lifestyle has attracted numerous biographies. Gender, race, class, and politics in Rossetti’s works, poetical and painterly, are also subjects explored by postmodern scholars. Exhibits and catalogues of Rossetti’s paintings abound, ranging from those devoted to specific time periods or subjects in Rossetti’s art—such as literary topics, his double works of art, portraiture, aesthetic representations of beauty—to the connections of his art with other Pre-Raphaelites. The reciprocal influence on other contemporary poets and artists, in particular Pre-Raphaelite painters, the impact of his art on aesthetes, symbolists, and modern artists are also subjects of interpretive criticism and exhibits. Though Rossetti did not compose music, his poetry has inspired several popular musical compositions. His notorious lifestyle, on the other hand, has been the subject of works of fiction, television, theater and film, most of which have taken liberties with biographical information in attempts to make it even more sensational to postmodern audiences.