The first room of the Tate Britain exhibition on Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti is dedicated to poetry: lines and lines in giant type on the walls. An unexpected but suitable overture to introduce an artist who as a boy was uncertain whether to become a poet or a painter, and above all his sister Christina. The two had published their first book of poetry when they were 15 and 16. Christina had continued on that path, writing over 900 poems, while Dante Gabriel had chosen painting.
The title of the exhibition “The Rossetti” aims to underline the importance of Dante Gabriel’s family: his parents, Italian academics who taught in London and who had encouraged their four children to be creative, the grandfather who had printed their first books and the three brothers, especially Christina, the poet who was also her lifelong accomplice, model and muse. The other significant presence is that of an acquired Rossetti: Elizabeth Siddal, a self-taught painter who had married Dante Gabriel starting an intense artistic collaboration.
medieval themes
In the first painting on display, Behold the handmaid of the Lord!, painted when Dante Gabriel was 21, Christina is Maria, while brother William is the angel. The two brothers together with five other art students and with the support of the family had recently founded the Pre-Raphaelite movement, to try to express lived experience, nature and love in an authentic way. The movement wanted to free both poetry and painting from realism, rejecting the industrial civilization of the nineteenth century to return to medieval themes.
Dante
Many women had joined the movement, including Siddal, a girl of humble origins who had not studied but cultivated artistic ambitions. She had started out as a model – she is the Ophelia of the famous painting by John Everett Millais of the same name – and then moved on to sharing the studio and life of Rossetti. In 1857 the two showed their works in an exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite art in London and New York with great success. Rossetti father had dedicated his life to translating and teaching Dante Alighieri, whom his artist son had then taken as a model for life, adding his name to the original Gabriel to pay him homage. The poet’s love for Beatrice has been a source of inspiration for numerous paintings, as well as the tragic story of Paolo and Francesca and others taken from the Divine Comedy.
Gabriel was also the first artist to illustrate Edgar Allan Poe’s verse, while Elizabeth was the first to illustrate Alfred Tennyson. Painting and poetry continued to be intertwined in their lives and in their works, one source of inspiration for the other. When Elizabeth died at the age of 32 from an overdose of laudanum – the opium tincture widely used in times – Gabriel dedicated a series of poems to her called The House of Life, inspired by Dante’s Vita Nuova and portrayed her in the painting Beata Beatrix, transfigured by death, with the poppy on her lap that had been fatal to her. The last rooms of the exhibition retrace the last twenty years of Rossetti’s life, who had dedicated in search of “universal beauty” becoming one of the first exponents of Aestheticism, “art for art’s sake”. They are his most famous paintings, sensual and opulent portraits of sumptuously dressed and bejeweled women, images saturated with color and enriched by an abundance of highly detailed flowers. A maximalist art that wanted to involve all the senses and that still hits the target today.