Dante Gabriel Rossetti Heaven. Around 1860, Rossetti returned to oil painting, abandoning the dense medieval compositions of the 1850s in favour of powerful close-up images of women in flat pictorial spaces characterised by dense colour. These paintings became a major influence on the development of the European Symbolist movement. In them, Rossetti's depiction of women became almost obsessively stylised. He portrayed his new lover Fanny Cornforth as the epitome of physical eroticism, whilst Jane Burden, the wife of his business partner William Morris, was glamorised as an ethereal goddess. "As in Rossetti's previous reforms, the new kind of subject appeared in the context
Olivia Rossetti Agresti magazine "The Germ". A granddaughter of Gabriele Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown, she was hence a niece of Maria Francesca Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti, as well as a first cousin of Ford Madox Ford. While still in their girlhood, Olivia and her sister, the future Helen Rossetti Angeli (1879-1969), began publishing an anarchist journal, "The Torch", in the basement of their family home. Despite their youth, this effort became the nucleus of a prominent anarchist salon which included Peter Kropotkin and Sergei Kravchinski, and their publishing coups included the pamphlet "Why I Am an Anarchist" by George