Sunday, November 6, 2011

Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter, Poet, Sexual Revolutionary?


In our time of confined specialization, it’s hard to comprehend the multimedia talents of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose poetry and painting helped shape the Victorian Age into the paradox-laden, hot mess of an era we know it as today. The recent reissue of Alicia Craig Faxon’s Dante Gabriel Rossetti, her masterful 1989 monograph on the artist—the the first and still the best—along with a new book on sex in the age of Queen Victoria, raises the question of whether a new job description should be added to Rossetti’s resume: sexual revolutionary? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter, Poet, Sexual Revolutionary?"

[Image: Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Lady Lilith (detail), 1867. Watercolor on paper, 20 x 16 ¾ in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Rogers Fund. 1908.]

[Many thanks to Abbeville Press for providing me with the image above and a review copy of Alicia Craig Faxon’s Dante Gabriel Rossetti.]

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