Dante Gabriel Rossetti Dante Gabriel Rossetti Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti (12 May 1828 – 9 April 1882), generally known as Dante Gabriel Rossetti (), was a British poet, illustrator, painter and translator, and a member of the Rossetti family. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. Rossetti was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement, most notably William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. His work also influenced the European Symbolists and was a major precursor of the Aesthetic movement. Rossetti's art was characterised by its
Dante Gabriel Rossetti inspired by a vision of a woman who bids him combine the human and the divine in his art. Rossetti was always more interested in the medieval than in the modern side of the movement, working on translations of Dante and other medieval Italian poets, and adopting the stylistic characteristics of the early Italians. Rossetti's first major paintings in oil display the realist qualities of the early Pre-Raphaelite movement. His "Girlhood of Mary Virgin" (1849) and "Ecce Ancilla Domini" (1850) portray Mary as a teenage girl. William Bell Scott saw "Girlhood" in progress in Hunt's studio and remarked on young