Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Born on the 12th of May, 1828, in London, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the second child and the eldest son of Italian expatriates. His father, Gabrielle Rossetti, was a Dante scholar , who had been exiled from Naples for writing poetry in support of the Neapolitan Constitution of 1819. Rossetti,s mother had trainers as a governess and supervised her children,s early education.

Few Victorian families were as gifted as the Rossettis : the oldest Maria Rossetti, published A Shadow of Dante (1871) and then went on to become an Anglican nun; William Rossetti , along with his brother, was an active member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and became an editor , man of letters, and memoirist. The youngest, Christina Georgina Rossetti became a very prominent and influential lyric poet.

As a child, D.G. Rossetti I tended to become a painter and illustrated literary subjects in his earliest drawings . He was tutored at home in German , the Bible, Shakespeare , The Arabian Nights, Dickens among others. After leaving school , he apprenticed himself to the historical painterFord Maddox Brown, who later became his closest friend. He also continued his extensive reading of poetry including Poe, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Coleridge, Blake , Browning among others. In 1845, he Bagan his translations from Italian and German medieval poetry.

D.G.Rossetti divide his attention between painting and poetry for the rest of his life. In 1848, he founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with six other young men, mostly painters, who shared an interest in contemporary poetry and an opposition to certain stale conventions of contemporary academy art. In a general way, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood sought to introduce new forms of thematic seriousness, high coloration, and attention to detail into contemporary British Art. Some of his poems are - ‘My Sister’s Sleep’ , ‘Ave’ , ‘ Jenny’ , ‘ Dante at Verona’ , among others.