Dante's blessed damozels

He may not have been the most talented member of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but Dante Gabriel Rossetti was easily the biggest romantic, says Michael Prodger

- Michael Prodger

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI changed British art at the age of 20 and, having done so, never really outgrew the obsessions of his youth. Rossetti was one of the seven founder members of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of painters, sculptors, and critics determined to reform art and clear it of old, staid conventions. Wanting to change the world—and believing it can be done —is a young man’s trait and the original members had barely hit adulthood; indeed, one of them, John Everett Millais, was still a teenager when they embarked on their crusade.

They signed their works with ‘PRB’ in lieu of their individual names and came up with a credo that was earnestly bordering on pompous: they committed to having ‘genuine ideas to express; to studying Nature ‘attentively’; to sympathizing with what was ‘direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art’; and to producing ‘thoroughly good pictures and statues. Nevertheless, when their first pictures were exhibited, they caused an almighty fuss. Dickens wrote a famous attack on Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents in which he lambasted the figure of Mary as ‘so hideous in her ugliness that… she would stand out from the rest of the company as a Monster, in the vilest cabaret in France, or the lowest gin-shop in England’. Needless to say, the PRB became instantly famous.