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
William Michael Rossetti William Michael Rossetti William Michael Rossetti (25 September 1829 – 5 February 1919) was an English writer and critic. Born in London, he was a son of immigrant Italian scholar Gabriele Rossetti and his wife Frances Rossetti "née" Polidori, and the brother of Maria Francesca Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Georgina Rossetti. He was one of the seven founder members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, and became the movement's unofficial organizer and bibliographer. He edited the Brotherhood's literary magazine "The Germ" which published four issues in 1850 and wrote the poetry reviews for it. It was William Michael