Although Rossetti was the soul of the earlier movement, he was a man whose temperament was even then essentially different from that of his comrades Millais and Hunt, who founded the Brotherhood with him in 1848. Even the two works which he exhibited with them in 1849 and 1850 make one feel the great gulf which lay between him and them. In the former year, when Hunt was represented by his “Rienzi,” and Millais by his “Lorenzo and Isabella,” Rossetti produced his “Girlhood of Mary Virgin.” In the following, when Hunt painted “The Converted British Family sheltering a Christian Missionary” and Millais “The Child Jesus in the Workshop of Joseph the Carpenter,” Rossetti came forward with his “Ecce Ancilla Domini.” “The Girlhood of Mary Virgin” was a little picture of austere simplicity and ascetic character; it was intentionally angular in drawing, and possessed a certain archaic bloom. The Virgin, clad in grey garments, sits at a curiously shaped frame embroidering a lily with gold threads upon a red ground. The flower she is copying stands before her in a vase, and a little angel, with roseate wings, is watering it with an air of abashed reverence. St. Anne is busy by the side of the Virgin—both being, respectively, portraits of the artist’s mother and sister—and in the background St. Joachim is binding a vine to a trellis. And several Latin books are lying upon the floor. The second work, “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” is the familiar picture which is now in the National Gallery—a harmony of white upon white of indescribable graciousness and delicacy. Mary, a bashful, meditative, and childlike maiden, in a white garment, is shown in a half-kneeling attitude upon a white bed. The walls of the chamber are white, and in front of her there stands a frame at which she has been working; and a piece of embroidery, with a lily which she has begun, hangs over it. Before her stands the angel with flame rising from his feet, in solemn, peaceful gravity, as he extends towards her the stalk of the lily which he holds. A dove flies gently in through the window. Now, in spite of their romantic subjects the work of Hunt and Millais is lucid and temperate, while Rossetti is dreamily mystical. The two former were straightforward, true, and natural, whereas the simplicity of the latter was subtilised and consciously affected. It was due to the vibrating delicacy of his distempered, seething imagination that he was able to give himself a deceptive appearance of being a primitive artist. The creative power of the two former is an earnest power of the understanding, whereas in the latter there is a vague dreaminess, a tendency to luxuriate in his own moods, an efflorescence of tones and colours. In the one case there is an angular but single-minded study of nature; in the other there is the demureness and embarrassment of the Quattrocento, a demureness breaking into blossom, and an embarrassment full of charm—a romanticism which cherished the yearning for repose in the childlike and innocent Middle Ages, and clothed it with all the attractions of mysticism. Holman Hunt, Madox Brown, and Millais were realists in their drawing, men who wanted to represent objects with all possible accuracy, to be faithful in rendering the finest fibre of a petal and every thread in a fabric. Rossetti’s picture was a symphonic ode in pigments, and he himself was one of the earliest of the modern lyricists of colour. This distinction became wider and wider with the course of time, and as early as 1858 he found himself deserted by his earlier comrades. Madox Brown, Holman Hunt, and especially Millais, in their further development, tended more and more to become Naturalists, and were finally led to completely realistic subjects from the immediate present by the inviolable fidelity with which they studied nature. On the other hand, Rossetti became the centre of a new circle of artists, who directed the current of what was originally Naturalism more and more into mysticism and refined archaism.
In 1856 The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine was founded as a monthly periodical. There were several contributions by Rossetti, and in this way he became so well known in Oxford that the Union accepted an offer from him to execute a series of wall-paintings. Accordingly he painted several pictures from the Arthurian legends, making the sketches for them himself, and employing for their elaboration a number of young men, some of them amateur artists and students at the University. In this way he came into connection with Arthur Hughes, William Morris, and Edward Burne-Jones. These artists, afterwards joined by Spencer Stanhope and Walter Crane, both of them younger men, became—with George Frederick Watts at their flank—the leading members of the new brotherhood, the representatives of that New pre-Raphaelitism in which interest is still centred in England.
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| ROSSETTI. | Pageant. MONNA ROSA. |
| (By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.) | |
Their art is a kind of Italian Renaissance upon English soil. The romantic chord which vibrates in old English poetry is united to the grace and purity of Italian taste, the classical lucidity of the Pagan mythology with Catholic mysticism, and the most modern riot of emotion with the demure vesture of the primitive Florentines. Through this mixture of heterogeneous elements English New Idealism is probably the most remarkable form of art upon which the sun has ever shone: borrowed and yet in the highest degree personal, it is an art combining an almost childlike simplicity of feeling with a morbid hautgoût, the most attentive and intelligent study of the old masters with free, creative, modern imagination, the most graceful sureness of drawing and the most sparkling individuality of colour with a helpless, stammering accent introduced of set purpose. The old Quattrocentisti wander amongst the real Italian flowers; but with the New pre-Raphaelites one enters a hot-house: one is met by a soft damp heat, bright exotic flowers exhale an overpowering fragrance, juicy fruits catch the eye, and slender palms, through the branches of which no rough wind may bluster, gently sway their long, broad fans.
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| ROSSETTI. | Cassell & Co. ECCE ANCILLA DOMINI. | ROSSETTI. | Portfolio. SANCTA LILIAS. |
| (By permission of Messrs. T. Agnew & Sons,the owners of the copyright.) | |||
Professor Lombroso would certainly find the material for ingenious disquisition in Rossetti, who introduced this Italian phase, and himself came of an Italian stock. And it might almost seem as if a soul from those old times had found its reincarnation in the lonely painter who lived at Chelsea, though it was a soul who no longer bore heaven in his heart like Fra Angelico. In his whole being he seems like a phenomenon of atavism, like a citizen of that long-buried Italy who, after many transmigrations, had strayed into the misty North, to the bank of the Thames, and from thence looked in his home-sickness ever towards the South, enveloped in poetry and glowing in the sun.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a Catholic and an Italian. Amid his English surroundings he kept the feelings of one of Latin race. His father, the patriot and commentator upon Dante, had originally lived in Naples, and inflamed the popular party there by his passionate writings. In consequence of the active part which he took in political agitation he lost his post at the Bourbon Museum, escaped from Italy upon a warship, disguised as an English officer, settled in London in 1824, and married Francesca Polidori, the daughter of a secretary of Count Alfieri. Here he became Professor of the Italian language at King’s College, and published several works on Dante, the most important of which, Dante’s Beatrice, written in 1852, once more supported the theory that Beatrice was not a real person. Dante Gabriel, the son of this Dante student Gabriele Rossetti, was born in London on 12th May 1828. The whole family actively contributed to scholarship and poetry. His elder sister, Maria Francesca, was the authoress of A Shadow of Dante, a work which gives a most valuable explanation of the scheme of The Divine Comedy; his younger sister, Christina, was one of the most eminent poetesses of England; and his brother, William Michael Rossetti, is well known as an art-critic and a student of Shelley. Even from early youth Dante Gabriel Rossetti was familiar with the world of Dante, and brought up in the worship of Dante’s wonderful age and an enthusiasm for his mystic and transcendental poetry. He knew Dante by heart, and Guido Cavalcanti. The mystical poet became his guide through life, and led him to Fra Angelico, the mystic of painting. Indeed, the world of Dante and of the painters antecedent to Raphael is his spiritual home.