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
Mnemosyne (Rossetti) Mnemosyne (Rossetti) Mnemosyne, also titled Lamp of Memory and Ricordanza, is an oil painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti begun in 1875 or early 1876 and completed in 1881. Jane Morris was the model, and Frederick Richards Leyland bought the painting in 1881 and displayed it in his drawing room with five other Rossetti "stunners." At about the same time Rossetti, a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, was painting "Astarte Syriaca", a larger painting completed in 1877 with Morris in a very similar pose. "Mnemosyne" began as an oil study for "Astarte Syriaca", for which Jane Morris sat over the winter