The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (414 page)

 
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(1439–1507).
Florentine painter. His successful career (the highpoint of which was painting frescos in the Sistine Chapel together with
Botticelli
,
Ghirlandaio
, and
Perugino
) was based on his facility and high standards of craftsmanship rather than on any great distinction or originality as an artist. His pupils included Fra
Bartolommeo
and
Piero di Cosimo
.

 
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Rossellino , Bernardo
(1409–64) and
Antonio

(1427–79).
Florentine sculptors, brothers. Bernardo worked as an architect as well as a sculptor and he combined both arts in his chief work—the tomb of the great humanist and Chancellor of the Florentine Republic, Leonardo Bruni, in Sta Croce, Florence (1444–50). It is based on the monument of the antipope John XXIII (Baldassare Cossa) by
Donatello
and
Michelozzo
in the Baptistery in Florence, and although less powerful is more graceful and harmonious; the pilasters framing the serene effigy, lying on a bier, have a dignity and elegance almost worthy of
Brunelleschi
. It became the model for the niche tomb for the rest of the century.
Antonio was trained by his brother, and his most ambitious work—the tomb of the Cardinal Prince of Portugal in S. Miniato al Monte, Florence (1461–6)—is based on Bernardo's Bruni tomb. It is more elaborate and concerned with movement than Bernardo's masterpiece, but also a less coherent design, and Antonio was a more distinguished artist when working on a smaller scale. He was a fine portraitist (
Giovanni Chellini
, V&A, London, 1456) and also made charming reliefs and statuettes of the Madonna and Child, in which he continued the tradition of Luca della
Robbia
of stressing the naturalness and humanity of the Virgin (perhaps the finest of his reliefs is that in the Met. Mus., New York).

 
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(1828–82).
English painter and poet. He came from a remarkable and talented family: his father was an exiled Italian patriot and Dante scholar, his sister the poet Christina Rossetti, and his brother the critic William Michael Rossetti. Growing up in modest circumstances but a strongly literary environment, he at first found it hard to decide whether he should devote himself to poetry or painting. Although painting became his profession (following the advice given to him by the poet and critic Leigh Hunt: ‘If you paint as well as you write, you may be a rich man’), he continued to write poetry and make translations from the Italian, and he is accorded a distinguished position as a literary figure. In 1848 he formed the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
with
Hunt
,
Millais
, and others. His
Girlhood of Mary Virgin
(Tate, London, 1849), the first picture to be exhibited bearing the Brotherhood's initials, was warmly praised and sold well, but the subsequent abuse that the Pre-Raphaelites received hurt him so much that he rarely again exhibited in public. In the 1850s he virtually gave up oils and concentrated on watercolours of medieval subjects. These found ready buyers (often contacts of
Ruskin
, whom Rossetti met in 1854), and Rossetti, who was a hard and skilful businessman, proved Leigh Hunt's prediction true—by the 1860s he was earning the very substantial sum of £3,000 a year.
In 1860 Rossetti married the beautiful but sickly Elizabeth Siddal, the archetypal Pre-Raphaelite ‘stunner’, after a long and sometimes vexed liaison. Her melancholy face haunted his imagination, and he portrayed ‘Guggums’ (as he called her) again and again—‘It is like a monomania with him’, wrote Ford Madox
Brown
in 1855. Rossetti immortalized her mainly in drawings, for in spite of the hatred for academic discipline that made him so disdainful of the official art world, he was an outstanding draughtsman. Elizabeth died from an overdose of laudanum, possibly deliberate, in 1862, and Rossetti was devastated; as a gesture of his grief he had the only complete manuscript of his poems placed in her coffin, but he was persuaded to have them exhumed in 1869 and they were published the following year. Rossetti also painted the intensely spiritual
Beata Beatrix
(Tate) as a memorial to Elizabeth, expressing his love for her as a parallel to Dante's for Beatrice (the picture is dated 1864, but was worked on over a period of several years). By the time of Elizabeth's death Rossetti had returned to oil painting, and in the last two decades of his life, his subject matter was confined almost exclusively to beautiful women, portrayed in a richly sensuous manner and often evoking literary or mythological references. Elizabeth was replaced as his favourite model by William
Morris's
wife Janey, who became in Rossetti's pictures one of the archetypal
femmes fatales
—all cascading curls, pouting lips, and smouldering eyes. Rossetti had met Morris and
Burne-Jones
in 1856 and entered into partnership with them in 1861 (in the decorative arts firm later known as Morris & Co.), but both business and personal relationships became strained; Rossetti was in love with Janey and he and Morris parted amid rancour in 1875. In his later years Rossetti became an eccentric recluse (he had a menagerie of unusual animals, including a wombat, the death of which occasioned a poem); he fought a losing battle against drugs and alcohol and he died paralysed and prematurely aged. Rossetti was nevertheless a commanding personality and his work was highly influential; his romantic medievalism inspired the second wave of Pre-Raphaelitism associated with Burne-Jones and other followers, and his
femmes fatales
appealed to the
Symbolists
and had a legion of descendants during the turn-of-the-century taste for ‘decadence’.

 
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