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
Monna Rosa "Proserpine". Three additional Rossetti painting were then hung in Leyland's drawing room, all of which Leyland called "stunners." Monna Rosa Monna Rosa is the title of two oil paintings by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, both of Frances Leyland, the wife of shipping magnate Frederick Richards Leyland. The earlier and smaller painting was completed in 1862 and its whereabouts is now unknown. The second was completed in 1867 and is now in a private collection. Frederick Leyland displayed the larger painting in his drawing room with five other Rossetti "stunners." Rossetti wrote to Frederick Leyland about the painting on 18 June 1867: