Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Old Masters

Abstract

Dante Gabriel Rossetti played a major role in forming Victorian patterns of taste. As a young painter, he rejected the conventional path by turning from the techniques of post-Raphaelite artists towards the style of the Italian and Flemish early Renaissance. A number of Rossetti's sonnets are dedicated to old master paintings and his work as an artist reflects various influences at different times in his career. In the 1860s he began to emulate Titian and the Venetian school, and at a later point he discovered Botticelli, who subsequently became an icon of the aesthetic movement. During the nineteenth century, art students in Western Europe were encouraged to revere their predecessors. Whether they were making detailed drawings after classical sculpture or copies from the old masters, the 'sense of the past' was always with them. The 'past', however, was not a static concept. As Francis Haskell has so brilliantly demonstrated, the precise identity of these great predecessors was constantly evolving and changing. (1) While some were 'in', others were 'out', and the space between the two took in a wide variety of 'grey areas'. The career of Dante Gabriel Rossetti illustrates the shifting sands of nineteenth-century taste. In 1846, as a young Royal Academy student, he told his godfather, the naturalist Charles Lyell, that he was 'making some drawings at the Academy from The Gates of San Giovanni at Florence, the work of Lorenzo Ghiberti, which Michel Angelo pronounced worthy to be the gates of Paradise'. (2) Appropriately enough, it was while Rossetti was studying the Academy's cast of the famous fifteenth-century doors that a fellow student, William Holman Hunt, noticed him: alone, perched on some steps stretched across my path, drawing in his sketch-book a single female figure from the gates of Ghiberti. I had recently been attentively drawing some of the groups for their expression and arrangement, and I told Rossetti then how eloquent the Keeper had been in his comments on seeing me at work from the group of 'The Finding of the Cup in Benjamin's Sack', saying that Ghiberti's principles of composition were in advance of his time in their variety of groupings, and that his great successors had all profoundly profited by these examples. (3) The Keeper, Mr Jones, told Hunt that he 'regretted that the gates were not more often studied by young painters' (Hunt, 1, 107). Hunt and Rossetti spoke for a while about 'these quattrocento epochal masterpieces', although, as Hunt remarks, it was their common love of the poetry of John Keats which brought about their 'intimate relations' (ibid.). From Richard Monckton Milnes's Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats, published in 1848, the young artists discovered that Keats, enthralled by prints of the Campo Santo frescos in Pisa, shared their enthusiasm for 'the early men'. (4) When they drew up a list of 'Immortals' in August 1848, however, expecting their friends to sign up to it, there were only two 'early men' among them, Ghiberti and Fra Angelico. Ghiberti was certainly 'Pre-Raphaelite', in the strictest sense of the word, and it is apposite that his work should have brought Hunt and Rossetti together. The name eventually chosen for their Brotherhood, formed with five others in 1848, demonstrated a shift in taste, a movement away from admiration for the artists of the high Renaissance to those, such as Ghiberti, who preceded them. The Pre-Raphaelite Brothers were not alone in championing what had previously been dismissed as 'primitive' art. Charles Lyell gave a copy of Anna Jameson's Memoirs of the Early Italian Painters, first published in 1845, to Rossetti. Reprinting a series of articles originally published in the Penny Magazine, the book's scope included painters from Cimabue to Titian and the Venetian school. The same author's Sacred and Legendary Art came out in 1848, with descriptions and illustrations of 'early' paintings. …