Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), English, A founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, this painter and poet fused medieval revivalism with lush, sensuous modernity, creating works that oscillate between sacred and profane. His art reveled in vivid color, intricate detail, and a haunting emotional intensity, often drawing from literature—Dante, Shakespeare, and Arthurian legend—to explore themes of love, death, and redemption. Women, frequently depicted with flowing hair and enigmatic expressions, dominated his canvases; they were neither passive muses nor mere beauties but complex symbols of desire and melancholy.
Life and art blurred in his world. His wife, Elizabeth Siddal, became both collaborator and tragic figure, her early death immortalized in *Beata Beatrix*, a painting that transfigured grief into transcendent beauty. Later, his obsession with Jane Morris, wife of William Morris, fueled a series of portraits where longing and guilt seeped through the gilded frames. Though criticized for his "fleshly" style—a term flung by detractors—his work influenced Symbolists and Aesthetes, bridging Romanticism and the avant-garde.
Beyond painting, his poetry echoed similar preoccupations: ornate, rhythmic, and steeped in melancholy. By the end of his life, addiction and declining health shadowed his output, yet even his later works retained a hypnotic power. Today, his legacy endures as a paradox—both a Victorian moralist and a subversive sensualist, forever caught between heaven and desire.