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
Pia de' Tolomei (Rossetti painting) Pia de' Tolomei (Rossetti painting) Pia de' Tolomei is an oil painting on canvas by English artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, painted around 1868 and currently housed at the Spencer Museum of Art, on the campus of the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. This work was painted at the start of Rossetti's affair with Jane Morris, who modelled for the picture. As he was to do with "Beata Beatrix" (1870), Rossetti chose a tale by Dante Aligheri (from "Purgatorio") to illustrate his love for his model. The story tells of a woman whose husband imprisoned and later poisoned her: Rossetti