Gabriele Rossetti

Gabriele Rossetti , 1783-1854, Italian poet and critic; father of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and of Christina Rossetti. Exiled in 1821, he fled first to Malta, where he stayed for three years, and then to England, where he lived until his death. There he wrote patriotic and liberal verse in Italian and a curious study attempting to show that Dante had written as spokesman for a vast, secret, ritualistic society opposed to tyranny. He was professor of Italian at King's College, London, from 1831 until he retired in 1845. His long romantic poem Il veggente in solitudine [the seer in solitude] was published in 1846 and his autobiography in 1849.

Bibliography: See R. D. Waller, The Rossetti Family (1932).

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828–1882), English painter and poet, and one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In his early years he was much influenced by Dante, and in his own poetry of this period Christian themes abound, his ideal of womanhood being expressed by the BVM and Beatrix. Of his paintings The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini (both in the Tate Gallery, London) recall something of the spiritual beauty of medieval pictures, but this simplicity is lacking in most of his work. From c.1863 religious motives disappear and his poetry and art are inherently sensual.