Rossetti, Gabriele, an Italian poet and man of letters, particularly concerned in Dantesque criticism, was born on 28th February 1783 at Vasto, in Abruzzo Citeriore, then forming part of the kingdom of Naples. His father, Nicola Rossetti, was engaged in the iron-trade of the district; his mother was Maria Francesca Pietrocola. The parents were not in easy circumstances, and had a large family: besides Gabriele, two of the sons attained some eminence, Andrea becoming a canon in the church, and Domenico being well reputed in letters and antiquities. Gabriele gave early signs of more than common ability, and was placed by the local grandee, the Marchese del Vasto, to study in the university of Naples. He had a fine tenor voice, and was sometimes urged to try his success on the operatic stage; he drew with such precision that some of his extant pen-drawings with sepia-ink might readily be taken for steel-engravings; he composed poetry, both written and improvised, and became one of the most noted improvisatori in Naples. The boyhood and youth of Rossetti passed in a period of great political commotion, consequent upon the revolutionary and imperial wars of France. The Bourbon king of Naples, Ferdinand I., was ousted by the Parthenopean Republic, and again by King Joseph, the brother of Napoleon, and his successor King Joachim (Murat), the emperor's brother-in-law, and Ferdinand had to retire to Sicily. Rossetti obtained an appointment as Curator of Ancient Bronzes in the Museum of Naples, and also as librettist to the operatic theatre of San Carlo: he wrote the libretto of an opera, Giulio Sabino, was well received at the court of the Napoleonic sovereigns, and in 1813 acted as a member of the provisional government sent to Rome by Murat. After the restoration of Ferdinand to Naples in 1815 he continued his connection with liberal politicians, and joined the widely-diffused secret society of the Carbonari. In 1820 a military uprising compelled King Ferdinand to grant a constitution on the model of that which had recently been established in Spain. Rossetti saluted its advent in one of his most celebrated odes, beginning 'Sei pur bella cogli astri sul crine' ('Beautiful indeed art thou, with the stars in thine hair'). The good faith of the king was highly dubious from the first, and in 1821 he abrogated the constitution, and put it down with the aid of Austrian troops. The constitutionalists were proscribed and persecuted, Rossetti among them. Two verses in one of his lyrics are said to have given especial offence to the king—'Chè i Sandi ed i Luvelli Non sono morti ancor' ('For Sands and Louvels are not yet dead')—alluding to the assassination of Kotzebue and of the Duc de Berri). Rossetti had to escape from Naples with the kindly connivance of the British admiral, Sir Graham Moore, who shipped him off to Malta in the disguise of a British naval officer. In Malta he was treated with great liberality and distinction by the governor, Mr Hookham Frere; and towards 1824 he came over to London, with good recommendations, to follow the career of a teacher of Italian. In 1826 he married Frances Mary Lavinia Polidori, daughter of a Tuscan father and English mother; soon afterwards he was elected professor of Italian in King's College, London. They had four children: (1) Maria Francesca, born 1827, died 1876 (author of A Shadow of Dante, &c.); (2) Gabriel Charles Dante (see below); (3) William Michael, born 1829 (critical writer, and editor of Shelley); (4) Christina Georgina (see below). In London Rossetti lived a studious, laborious, and honourable life, greatly respected by his pupils, and by Italian residents and visitors; he was a man of strong and steady affections and vivacious temperament, earnest and single-minded in all his pursuits. In politics he was a vigorous liberal, but more inclined to a constitutional monarchy than a republic; in religion he was mainly a freethinker, but tending in his later years towards an undogmatic form of Christianity. Though totally opposed to the papal system and pretensions, he would not openly abjure, in a Protestant country, the Roman Catholic creed of his fathers. His health began to fail towards 1842, and his sight became dim, one eye being wholly lost. After some attacks of a paralytic character he died in Albany Street, London, on 26th April 1854. Besides some poems published in Italy, Rossetti produced the following works: Dante, Commedia (the Inferno only was published), with a commentary aiming to show that the poem is chiefly political and anti-papal in its inner meaning (1826); Lo Spirito Antipapale che produsse la Riforma ('The Anti-papal spirit which produced the Reformation')—an English translation also was published, reinforcing and greatly extending the same general views (1832); Iddio e l'Uomo, Salterio ('God and Man, a Psalter'), poems (1833); Il Mistero dell'Amor Platonico del Medio Evo ('The Mysterious Platonic Love of the Middle Ages'), 5 vols., a book of daring and subtle speculation tending to develop the analogy between many illustrious writers as forming a secret society of anti-Catholic thought, and the doctrines of Gnosticism and freemasonry (1840); this book was printed and prepared for publication, but withheld as likely to be deemed rash and subversive; La Beatrice di Dante, contending that Dante's Beatrice was a symbolic personage, not a real woman (1842); Il Veggente in Solitudine ('The Seer in Solitude'), a speculative and partly autobiographical poem (1846); it circulated largely, though clandestinely, in Italy, and a medal of Rossetti was struck there in commemoration; Versi (miscellaneous poems), 1847; L'Arpa Evangelica ('The Evangelic Harp'), religious poems (1852). The views of Rossetti regarding Dante, along with Petrarcha and many other Italian authors, excited a great deal of controversy, which still continues in various forms and with varying fortunes. His memory is much revered in his native place, where the house of his birth has been bought as public property, and a theatre and the chief square have been named after him.
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI (or properly Gabriel Charles Dante), elder son of the foregoing, was born in Charlotte Street, Portland Place, London, on 12th May 1828. He was educated in King's
College School, London; but, having from his earliest years evinced a wish to become a painter, he was taken from school in 1843 and commenced the study of art, entering soon afterwards the antique school of the Royal Academy. Here he associated with the young painters John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, and the sculptor Thomas Woolner; along with these three he founded the so-called Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which was completed by the addition of three other members. The chief incentive to the foundation of this society, and of the school of art which it initiated, was the distaste and disrespect felt by the youthful artists for the poverty-stricken conceptions and slurred execution which marked most of the art then current in England, mingled with a sincere and reverent delight in those qualities of genuine and spontaneous invention, lofty feeling, and patient handiwork, which had been developed by the European schools of art preceding the culmination of Raphael and his followers. A natural result of this frame of mind was a disposition to realise objective details to the utmost, with a view to the thorough authenticity of the visible means through which ideas are conveyed; but it was a mistake of some observers, who noticed a scrupulous exactness and sometimes a plethora of details, to suppose that the main concern of the associated artists was really with the details, and not with the ideas. The English Pre-Raphaelites wished to exhibit true and high ideas through the medium of true and rightly elaborated details. Two other mistakes have been frequently repeated concerning these artists; first, that they were an offshoot of the 'Tractarian' movement, guided by religious piety; and second, that they were set going by Mr Ruskin. Rossetti's earliest oil-picture, exhibited in 1849, was 'The Girlhood of Mary Virgin'; his next (1850), now in the National Gallery, 'The Annunciation.' After this he withdrew from exhibiting almost entirely, and his art developed through other phases, in which the sense of human beauty, intensity of abstract expression, and richness of colour were leading elements. He produced numerous water-colours of a legendary or romantic cast, several of them being from the poems of Dante, others from the Arthurian tradition. Among his principal oil-pictures are the Triptych for Llandaff Cathedral, of the 'Infant Christ adored by a Shepherd and a King,' 'The Beloved' (the Bride of the Canticles), 'Dante's Dream' (now in the Walker Gallery, Liverpool), 'Beata Beatrix' (National Gallery), 'Pandora,' 'Proserpine,' 'The Blessed Damozel' (from one of his own poems), 'The Roman Widow,' 'La Ghirlandata,' 'Venus Astarte,' 'The Day-dream.' He designed several large compositions, such as the 'Magdalene at the door of Simon the Pharisee,' 'Giotto Painting Dante's Portrait,' 'Cassandra,' and the 'Boat of Love' (from a sonnet by Dante); but these he failed to carry out as pictures on an adequate scale, partly owing to his receiving constant commissions to execute smaller works, consisting mostly of female half-figures ideal in invention or feeling, and executed in life-size. The early studies of Rossetti in art had not been so steady or systematic as might have been wished. Afterwards, beginning in 1848, he had the advantage of some friendly training from his constant intimate, Mr Ford Madox Brown, the historical painter; but, notwithstanding his passionate impulse as an inventive artist, and his impressive realisation of beauty in countenance and colour, some shortcomings in severe draughtsmanship and in technical method, and some degree of mannerism in form and treatment, have often, and not unjustly, been laid to his charge. Rossetti began writing poetry about the same time that he took definitely to the study of painting. Besides some juvenile work, and some translations from the German (that of Henry the Leper, by the mediæval poet, Hartmann von der Ane, is preserved), he executed a number of translations from Dante and other Italians, published in 1861 as The Early Italian Poets, and again in 1874 as Dante and his Circle. Two of his best-known original poems, The Portrait and The Blessed Damozel, were written in his nineteenth year, and many others followed. These were about to be published in 1862 in a volume (some of them having been previously printed in magazines—chiefly in The Germ, 1850, and The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1856), but a domestic calamity intervened, and all idea of publication was set aside for some years. Rossetti had fallen in love towards 1851 with a very beautiful girl, a dressmaker's assistant, named Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal; he married her in 1860, but she died suddenly in February 1862. In the first impulse of desperation he buried his MSS. in her coffin. In 1869 he thought fit to recover them, and in 1870 he issued his volume named Poems, containing the bulk of those compositions and several others written not long before the date of publication. This volume was a success with poetical readers, and was reviewed with great admiration and even enthusiasm by some leading critics. Late in 1871, however, Mr Robert Buchanan, writing in the Contemporary Review under the pseudonym of Thomas Maitland, attacked the book on literary, and more especially on moral grounds, and soon afterwards he republished his article, The Fleshly School of Poetry, as a pamphlet. Rossetti was now in a depressed state of health, suffering much from insomnia, from an abuse of chloral as a palliative, and from weakened eyesight (he often thought he would become blind, as his father had very nearly been). The literary detraction, conspiring with physical malady, produced a strong and exaggerated effect upon him; and from about the middle of 1872 he became morbidly sensitive and gloomy, and very reclusive in his habits of life, though his naturally strong sense, and his turn of mind, in which a good deal of humour and practicability was blended with idealism, continued to form a substantial counterbalance. In 1881 he published a second volume of poems named Ballads and Sonnets (containing some of his finest work, 'Rose Mary,' 'The White Ship,' 'The King's Tragedy,' and the completed sonnet-sequence, 'The House of Life'), and at the same time he re-issued, with some omissions and interpolations, the Poems of 1870. His health was by this time extremely shattered. A touch of paralysis affected him towards the end of 1881, and, retiring in the hope of some improvement to Birchington-on-Sea, near Margate, he died there of uræmia on 9th April 1882. The poetry of Rossetti is intense in feeling, exalted in tone, highly individual in personal gift, picturesque and sometimes pictorial in treatment, and elaborately wrought in literary form. These characteristics are sometimes made consistent with simplicity, but more generally with subtlety, of emotion or of thought. As in his paintings, there is a strong mediæval tendency. It is now generally allowed that Mr Buchanan's charges of immorality against the writings were wide of the mark; indeed, he himself has admitted and proclaimed as much. Rossetti was intimate at one or other period of his life with many of the best men of the day. In politics he took no part. His religious views were vague—at times negative enough; but he had a strong sense of reverence, and a tendency to superstition rather than distinct faith. In person he was of middling height, with a handsome, expressive physiognomy, more Italian than English. His portrait, a pencil-drawing executed by himself towards the age of eighteen, is in the National Portrait Gallery. He was generous, unthrifty, warm-tempered, clear-headed but not discursive in habit of mind, very natural and unaffected in manner, concentrated in aims and modes of work. In almost all companies in which he mixed he assumed and preserved a marked ascendancy, due to his exceptional faculty and uncompromising tone of mind and character.
CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI, younger daughter of Gabriele and Frances Rossetti, was born in Charlotte Street, Portland Place, London, on 5th December 1830. She was brought up entirely at home under her mother's tuition, as a member of the Anglican Church. She began writing verse in early girlhood. Before she was seventeen a little volume of her poetry was privately printed by her maternal grandfather, Gaetano Polidori, who kept a printing-press for his own convenience at his residence in London. Her publications are Goblin-Market and other Poems (1862), The Prince's Progress and other Poems (1866), Singsong (1872), A Pageant and other Poems (1881); and, in prose, Commonplace and other Stories (1870), Speaking Likenesses (1874), Verses (1893), and a few devotional volumes, among them Time Flies, a Reading Diary (with verses, 1885), and The Face of the Deep (on the Apocalypse, 1892). Most of her poems were re-issued in 1890; and after her death, her brother William undertook a complete edition of her works. Miss Rossetti, whose health was weak, died 29th December 1894. She had lived a very secluded life, divided between devoted attention to her mother (who died at a very advanced age in 1886), and earnest religious thought and practice. In direct poetic gift and intrinsic quality of poetry she may be regarded as fully equal to her brother Dante Gabriel, although the outcome is of a less conspicuous kind. Her poems have a singular degree of grace, delicacy, and spontaneity, deep in feeling, sensitive and certain in touch, and marked by great purity of emotional thought, and by an unfailing instinct of style. Several of her lyrics have been set to music, and cantatas for two of the longer poems—Goblin-Market and Songs in a Corn-field—were composed by Aguilar and Macfarren. See her Life by Mackenzie Bell (1898).
As to Gabriele Rossetti, various critical articles regarding him, more especially discussing or confuting his views concerning Dante, &c., will be found in contemporary periodicals, and in some volumes; the work of Aroux, entitled Dante Hérétique, Révolutionnaire, et Socialiste (1854), is founded chiefly on Rossetti's researches, which it presents in an exaggerated form. As to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, see William Sharp, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a Record and Study (1882); Hall Caine, Recollections (1882); Joseph Knight, Life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1887; 'Great Writers' series); William Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer (1889); the article by Theodore Watts in the Encyclopædia Britannica; the monograph in the Portfolio by F. G. Stephens (1894); and the Memoir and Family Letters (2 vols. 1895) by his brother William Michael (born 1829), author of the above article, who has also published the following books: Dante's Comedy, the Hell, blank verse translation (1865); Fine Art, chiefly Contemporary (1867); Lives of Famous Poets (1878); Life of John Keats (1887); Shelley's Adonais, with Notes, &c. (Clarendon Press, 1891); annotated editions of Shelley and of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (2 vols. 1886), and other writings.
ROSSI, PELLEGRINO, was born of a noble family at Carrara, 13th July 1787. He studied at Bologna, and was made professor of Law there at twenty-five. Exiled after the fall of Murat, he obtained a chair at Geneva, and there wrote his Traité de Droit Pénal. In 1833 Louis-Philippe called him to Paris, and appointed him professor of Political
Economy at the Collège de France. For his Cours de Droit Constitutionnel (1836) he was naturalised and made a member of the Chamber of Peers. He was sent to Rome as ambassador in 1845, and there witnessed all the events of 1848, having again become an Italian subject after the fall of Louis-Philippe. When called to the ministry by Pius IX. Rossi strove to oppose the party favourable to the House of Savoy, and devised an alliance with Naples, his object being a confederation of Italian princes with the pope as president. This roused the hatred of the Romans, and Rossi was stabbed to death by an unknown hand on the 15th November 1848.