Dante Gabriel Rossetti revisited

Revered as a legend in his own time, the English painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, of partly Italian parentage, was a profoundly charismatic cultural exemplar, creating and shaping late-Victorian artistic trends. A rebel, Rossetti was leader of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a reaction to contemporary establishment tastes in art. As a poet, Rossetti was thought to be one of England's most exalted literary talents and, as a painter, he excelled in depictions of an idealized, neuroticized femininity which some Victorians found thrilling, others shocking. In his day, Rossetti was the foremost exponent of art for art's sake, art arising from the pure creative impulse of the soul. To his much-trumpeted creativity, Rossetti added the colorful personality attributes of substance abuser, ardent lover in celebrated liaisons, and tortured, aspiring soul. In Dante Gabriel Rossetti Revisited David G. Riede reveals how Rossetti - while assiduously cultivating his image as an artist of exquisite, eccentric genius in splendid isolation from society - was in fact a consummate tastemaker in his own society and times. Riede's penetrating reappraisal shows how Rossetti, accurately sensing the need for cultural novelty befitting the aspirations of the rising mercantile class, astutely created a new aesthetic paradigm and cult following to go with it which exerted enormous influence over the tastes and art-buying propensities of England's powerful class of nouveaux riches. The author examines Rossetti's role as a cultural icon of his era, shaped by the commercial value system his Victorian contemporaries were so sure he opposed. As part of his refreshing and well-informed analysis, Riede traces Rossetti's self-creation as a kind of marketable commodity. Professor Riede also comments perceptively on Rossetti's use of women as mirror for the projection of male erotic fantasies, thus adding fascinating new insights to feminist currents in contemporary art history.