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
Beata Beatrix England. Beata Beatrix Beata Beatrix is an oil on canvas painting by Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, completed in 1870. It depicts Beatrice Portinari from Dante Alighieri's poem "La Vita Nuova" at the moment of her death. The painting's title in English translates to 'Blessed Beatrice'. "La Vita Nuova" had been a story that Rossetti had found of interest from childhood and he had begun work translating it into English in 1845 and published it in his work, "The Early Italian Poets". Rossetti modeled Beatrice after his deceased wife and frequent model, Elizabeth Siddal, who died in 1862. The painting