Rossetti
GABRIELE, an Italian poet and critic; born in Vasto, Abruzzo Citeriore, then forming part of the kingdom of Naples, Feb. 28, 1783. His father, Nicola Rossetti, was engaged in the iron trade of the district; his mother was Maria Francesca Pietrocola. The parents were not in easy circumstances, and had a large family; besides Gabriele, two of the sons attained some eminence, Andrea becoming a canon in the Church, and Domenico be- ROSSETTI ing well reputed in letters and antiquities.
Gabriele gave early signs of more than common ability, and was placed by the local grandee, the Marchese del Vasto, to study in the University of Naples. He had a fine tenor voice, and was sometimes urged to try his success on the operatic stage; he drew with such precision that some of his extant pen-drawings with sepia-ink might readily be taken for steel engravings; he composed poetry, both written and improvised, and became one of the most noted impi noted of the most noted improvisatori in Naples. The boyhood and youth of Rossetti passed in a period of great political commotion, consequent on the revolutionary and imperial wars of France. The Bourbon King of Naples, Ferdinand I., was ousted by the Parthenopean Republic, and again by King Joseph, the brother of Napoleon, and his successor King Joachim (Murat), the emperor's brother-in-law, and Ferdinand had to retire to Sicily.
Rossetti obtained an appointment as curator of ancient bronzes in the Museum of Naples, and also as librettist to the operatic theater of San Carlo; he wrote the libretto of an opera, "Giulio Sabino," was well received at the court of the Napoleonic sovereigns, and in 1813 acted as a member of the provisional government sent to Rome by Murat. After the restoration of Ferdinand to Naples in 1815 he continued his connection with liberal politicians and joined the widely diffused secret society of Carbonari. In 1820 a military uprising compelled King Ferdinand to grant a constitution on the model of that which had recently been established in Spain. Rossetti saluted its advent in one of his most celebrated odes, beginning, "Beautiful indeed art thou, with the stars in thine hair." The good faith of the king was highly dubious from the first, and in 1821 he abrogated the constitution and put it down with the aid of Austrian troops. The Constitutionalists were proscribed and persecuted, Rossetti among them. He escaped and about 1824 made his way to London to follow the career of a teacher of Italian. In 1826 he married Frances Mary Lavinia Polidori, daughter of a Tuscan father and English mother; soon afterward he was elected Professor of Italian in King's College, London. They had four children: (1) Maria Francesca, born 1827, died 1876 (author of "A Shadow of Dante," etc.); (2) Gabriel Charles Dante (see below); (3) William Michael, born 1829 (critical writer, and editor of Shelley; see below); (4) Christina Georgina (see below). In London Rossetti lived a studious, laborious, and honorable life. In politics he was a vigorous liberal, but more inclined to a constitutional monarchy than a republic; in religion he was ROSSETTI mainly a freethinker, but tending in his later years toward an undogmatic form of Christianity. Though totally opposed to the papal system and pretensions, he would not openly abjure, in a Protestant country, the Roman Catholic creed of his fathers. His health began to fail in 1842, and his sight became dim. After some attacks of a paralytic character he died in London, April 26, 1854.
Besides some poems published in Italy, Rossetti produced the following works: "Dante, Commedia" (the Inferno only was published), with a commentary aiming to show that the poem is chiefly political and anti-papal in its inner meaning (1826); "Lo Spirito Antipapale che produsse la Riforma" ("The Anti-Papal spirit which produced the Reformation"-an English translation also was published), reinforcing and greatly extending the same general views (1832); "Iddio e l'Uomo, Salterio" ("God and Man, a Psaltery"), poems (1833); "Il Mistero dell' Amor Platonico del Medio Evo" ("The Mysterious Platonic Love of the Middle Ages"), five volumes (1840). This book was printed and prepared for publication, but withheld as likely to be deemed rash and subversive; "La Beatrice di Dante," contending that Dante's Beatrice was a symbolic personage, not a real woman (1842); "Il Veggente in ROSSETTI from school in 1843 and began the study of art, entering soon afterward the antique school of the Royal Academy. Here he associated with the young painters John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, and the sculptor Thomas Woolner; along with these three he founded the so-called Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which was completed by the addition of three other members.
The chief incentive to the foundation of this society, and of the school of art which it initiated, was the distaste of the followers for the commonplace subjects and slurred execution in current English art. They aimed to revive the lofty feeling, and patient handiwork, which had been developed by the European schools of art preceding the culmination of Raphael and his followers. The English Pre-Raphaelites wished to exhibit true and high ideas through the medium of true and rightly elaborated details. Rossetti's earliest oil picture, exhibited in 1849, was "The Girlhood of Mary Virgin"; his next (1850), now in the National Gallery, "The Annunciation." After this he withdrew from exhibiting almost entirely, and his art developed through other phases, in which the sense of human beauty, intensity of abstract expression, and richness of color were leading elements. He produced ("The Seer in Solitude"), a speculative (1842) ; "Il Veggente in Solitudine" merous water-colors of a legendary or were leading elements. He produced nuand partly autobiographical poem (1846); it circulated largely, though clandestinely, in Italy, and a medal of Rossetti was struck there in commemoration; "Versi" (miscellaneous poems) (1847); and "L'Arpa Evangelica" ("The Evangelic Harp"), religious poems (1852).
CHRISTINA GEORGINA, an English poet; born in London, England, Dec. 5, 1830, daughter of the preceding. "Goblin Market" (1862) is regarded as her finest production. Her other writings consist chiefly of lyric poems of great beauty, and sonnets mostly of a devotional order.
They include: "The Prince's Progress" (1866); "Commonplace, and Other Short Stories" (in prose: prose: 1870); "Sing-Song:
A Nursery Rhyme Book" (1872); "Annus Domini: A Prayer for Each Day in the Year" (1873); "Speaking Likenesses" (1874); "Seek and Find" (1879); "A Pageant, and Other Poems" (1881); "Letter and Spirit" (1883); "Verses" (1893); and several posthumous works.
She died Dec. 29, 1894.
DANTE GABRIEL (or properly GABRIEL CHARLES DANTE), an English painter and poet; born in London, May 12, 1828, eldest son of Gabriele. He was educated in King's College School, London; but, having from his earliest years evinced a wish to become a painter, he was taken romantic cast, several of them being from the poems of Dante, others from the Arthurian tradition.
Among his principal oil pictures are the Triptych for Llandaff Cathedral, of the "Infant Christ Adored by a Shepherd and a King," "The Beloved" (the Bride of the Canticles), "Dante's Dream" (now in the Walker Gallery, Liverpool), "Beata Beatrix" (National Gallery), "Pandora," "Proserpine," "The Blessed Damozel" (from one of his own poems) "The Roman Widow," "La Ghirlandata," "Venus Astarte," "The Day-dream." He designed several large compositions, such as the "Magdalene at the door of Simon the Pharisee," "Giotto Painting Dante's Portrait," "Cassandra," and the "Boat of Love" (from a sonnet by Dante).
Notwithstanding his passionate impulse as an inventive artist, and his impressive realization of beauty in countenance and color, some shortcomings in severe draughtsmanship and in technical method, and some degree of mannerism in form and treatment, have often, and not unjustly, been laid to his charge.
Rossetti began writing poetry about the same time that he took definitely to the study of painting. Besides some juvenile work, and some translations from the German (that of "Henry the Leper," by the mediæval poet, Hartmann ROSSETTI von der Aue, is preserved), he executed a number of translations from Dante and other Italians, published in 1861 as "The Early Italian Poets," and again in 1874 as "Dante and his Circle." Two of his best-known original poems, "The Portrait" and "The Blessed Damozel," were written in his 19th year, and many others followed. Rossetti had fallen in love toward 1851 with a very beautiful girl, a dressmaker's assistant, named Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal; he married her in 1860, but she died suddenly in February, 1862. In the first impulse of desperation he buried his MSS. in her coffin. In 1869 he thought fit to recover them, and in 1870 he issued his volume named "Poems." This volume was a success with poetical readers, and was reviewed with great admiration and even enthusiasm by some leading critics. Late in 1871, however, Mr. Robert Buchanan, writing in the "Contemporary Review" under the pseudonym of "Thomas Maitland," attacked the book on literary, and more especially on moral grounds.
Rossetti was now in a depressed state of health, suffering much from insomnia, from an abuse of chloral as a palliative, and from weakened eyesight. About the middle of 1872 he became morbidly sensitive and gloomy, and very recluse in his habits of life. In 1881 he published a second volume of poems named "Ballads and Sonnets" (containing some of his finest work, "Rose Mary," "The White Ship," "The King's Tragedy," and the completed sonnet-sequence, "The House of Life"). A touch of paralysis affected him toward the end of 1881, and, retiring in the hope of some improvement to Birchington--on-Sea, near Margate, he died there April 9, 1882.
The poetry of Rossetti is intense in feeling, exalted in tone, highly individual in personal gift, picturesque and sometimes pictorial in treatment, and elaborately wrought in literary form.
These characteristics are sometimes made consistent with simplicity, but more generally with subtlety, of emotion or of thought. As in his paintings, there is a strong mediæval tendency.
WILLIAM MICHAEL, an English poet and art critic; born in London, England, Sept. 25, 1829; brother of Dante Gabriel. He entered the excise office in 1845, and was assistant secretary of the Board of Inland Revenue in 1869-1894.
He was the author of "Dante's Comedy-The Hell, Translated into Literal Blank Verse" (1865); "Poems and Ballads: A Criticism" [of Swinburne] (1866); "A Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley" (1869); and "Life of John Keats" (1887). He edited the works of many poets. He died in 1919.
ROSSINI