Gabriel Charles Rossetti, named after the Italian poet Dante Alghieri, was the son of an Italian patriot and his wife living in London. He adopted the name Dante in response to his father's admiration for the great Italian poet, and later in life made the story of Dante and his beloved Beatrice part of his personal and artistic mythology.
In 1848 Rossetti founded, along with the other artists Ford Madox Brown,
John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,
which sought to return art to the purity of the style preceding Raphael and
the neoclassical movement. Although he wrote from the same period,
he was at first better known as a painter than a poet. In 1850 Rossetti
fell in love with his model Elizabeth Siddal (most famous as Ophelia in Millais'
painting of that name), herself an aspiring poet and artist, whom he first
lived with and then married in 1860. After a period of invalidism
and a still-born child, she died of an overdose of laudanum, perhaps deliberate.
In the late 1860s, Rossetti fell commenced a long affair with Jane
Morris, the wife of his friend William; she served as model for many of his
poems from this period on. Although his poetry found greater favour
in the 1870s, he was attacked along with his friend
Swinburne by Robert Buchanan as a proponent of
"The Fleshly School of Poetry." Rossetti was a major influence on later
Victorians of aesthetic and decadent leanings, including Wilde and Pater.
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