| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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written with the object of contradicting misstatements and correcting misapprehensions regarding Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s life and character…” (xi). Not surprisingly, his family portrays him as a good brother, one always, in their view, destined to be a great artist. This appraisal is reflected in secondary sources that show Rossetti, despite his own pecuniary trouble, generously supporting his sister Christina’s poetry, especially, according to Goldberg, in illustrating and laying out the galleys for her books (145). Almost all secondary sources make note of Rossetti’s Anglo-Italian heritage (Grylls 13; Thirwell 45–46; Hilton 26). Nevertheless, as William Michael writes, “there was a certain British bluffness streaking the finely poised Italian suppleness and facility” (xiii). This merging of cultural traits produced a remarkably gregarious man. According to William Michael, “From an early period of life he had a large circle of friends…” (xv). Both William Michael and Helen note the lifelong friendship with Ford Madox Brown, about which Helen concludes, “In the annals of art and artists there have been few friendships as cordial, helpful, and enduring as that between Ford Madox Brown and Dante Gabriel Rossetti” (39). Friendships play a large role in the establishment of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Portrayal Two shows Rossetti as the founder of an art movement. William Michael also knew from childhood that “Gabriel was meant to be a painter” (Thirwell 81). The story of the founding of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood in 1848 is well known as is its flourishing with the attention of art critic John Ruskin. There were two phases of Pre-Raphaelitism in which Rossetti was significant. He is credited with leading the revolt of the original seven founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, including Sir John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, against the Royal Academy of Art. Their quest was the creation of an art true to nature along the line of painting before the High Renaissance painter Raphael. According to H. W. Janson, during the High Renaissance, painters and sculptors relied on subjective rather than objective standards of truth and beauty (417). The Pre-Raphaelites rejected Raphael and his contemporaries and tried to recover the more primitive art of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when art was bound by universal