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
Christina Rossetti Later she became involved with the linguist Charles Cayley, but declined to marry him, also for religious reasons. The third offer came from the painter John Brett, whom she likewise refused. Rossetti sat for several of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's most famous paintings. In 1848, she was the model for the Virgin Mary in his first completed oil painting, "The Girlhood of Mary Virgin", which was the first work to be inscribed with the initials "PRB", later revealed to signify the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The following year she modelled for his depiction of the Annunciation, "Ecce Ancilla Domini". A line from her