Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 – 1882) was a painter and poet, brother of Christina Rossetti.  In 1848 he was one of the founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, who rejected Victorian materialism and wanted to bring back into art what they saw as a pre-Renaissance purity.  He worked on English translations of Italian poetry and published a volume of his collected poems in 1870.  His long and widely-acclaimed sonnet sequence ‘House of Life’ appeared in Ballads and Sonnets (1881).