Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/891

Rh R O S R O S 857 detail the original terra cotta is superior to the finished marble, especially in the treatment of the infant Christ. EOSSELLINO, BERNARDO (1 409-1464), was no less able as a sculptor than his younger brother (see above), and was also a very distinguished architect. His finest piece of sculpture is the tomb, in the Florentine Santa Croce, of Leonardo Bruni of Arezzo, the historian of Florence ; the recumbent effigy is a work of great merit. The inner cathedral pulpit at Prato, circular in form on a tall slender stem, was partly the work of Mino da Fiesole and partly by Bernardo Eossellino. The latter executed the very minute reliefs of St Stephen and the Assumption of the Virgin. For his part in the work he received sixty-six gold florins. The South Kensington Museum possesses a relief by Bernardo, signed and dated (1456). It is a fine por- trait of the physician Giovanni da S. Miniato. 1 Bernardo's works as an architect were very numerous and important, and he was also very skilful as a military engineer. He restored the church of S. Francis at Assisi, and designed several fine buildings at Civita Vecchia, Orvieto, and elsewhere. He also built fortresses and city walls at Spoleto, Orvieto, and Civita Castellana. He was largely employed by Nicholas V. and Pius II. for restorations in nearly all the great basilicas of Rome, but at present little trace of his work remains, owing to the sweeping altera- tions which were made during the tasteless 17th and 18th centuries. Between the years 1461 and 1464 (the date of his death) he occupied the important post of capo-maestro to the Florentine duomo. A number of buildings at Pienza, executed for Pius II., are attributed to him the Vatican registers mention the architect of these as M Bernardo di Fiorenza, but this indication is too slight to make it certain that the elder Rossellino is referred to (see Vasari, ed. Milanesi, iii. 93 sq.). ROSSETTI, DANTE GABRIEL (1828-1882), poet and painter, whose full baptismal name was Gabriel Charles Dante, was born May 12, 1828, at 38 Charlotte Street, Portland Place, London. He was the first of the two sons and the second of the four children of Gabriele Rossetti, the Italian poet and patriot, whose career was at one period as turbulent as that of his illustrious son was (as far as mere outward incidents went) uneventful. About 1824 Gabriele Rossetti, the father, after many vicissitudes, reached England, where he married in 1826 Frances Polidori, sister of Byron's Dr Polidori and daughter of a Tuscan who had in early youth been Alfieri's secretary and who had married an English lady. From his mother the subject of this notice inherited as many English traits as Italian, or indeed more. In 1831 Gabriele became professor of Italian in King's College, London, and afterwards achieved a recognized position as a subtle and original, if eccentric, commentator on Dante. Dante Rossetti's education was begun at a private school in Foley Street, Portland Place, where he remained, however, only nine months, from the autumn of 1835 to the summer of 1836. He next went (in the autumn of 1836) to King's College School, where he remained till the summer of 1843, having reached the fourth class. From early childhood he had displayed a marked pro- pensity for drawing and painting. It had therefore from the first been tacitly assumed that his future career would be an artistic one, and he left school early. In Latin, however, he was already fairly proficient for his age ; French he knew well ; Italian he had spoken from childhood, and he had some German lessons about 1844-45. But, although he learned enough German to be able to translate the Anne Heinrich of Hartmann von 1 See Perkins, Italian Sculptors, 1864, i. p. 207 ; also Id., Tuscan Sculptors, p. 202, soul Historical Handbook of Italian Sculpture, 1883, p. 121. Aue, and some portions of the Nibelungenlied, he after- wards forgot the language almost entirely. His Greek too, such as it had been, he lost. On leaving school he went to Cary's Art Academy (previously called Sass's), near Bedford Square, and thence obtained admission to the Royal Academy Antique School towards 1846. He did not attend the Royal Academy Life School, and no doubt his defective knowledge of anatomy was some obstacle to him in after life. The truth is, however, that Rossetti's occasionally defective drawing (which, as regards the throat, is most striking) did not arise mainly from ignorance; it was the result of a peculiar mannerism. Admiring long and slender necks, and drawing them admirably in such masterpieces as Beata Beatrix and Monna Vanna, he refused to see that in art as in ethics the point of virtue lies midway between two opposite vices. Admiring large hands and massive arms in a woman, and drawing them admirably in such designs as Proserpine, Reverie, &c., he refused to see that hands can be too large, arms too massive. As a colourist, however, Rossetti may be said to have required no teaching. Mastery over colour seemed to have come to him by instinct. Of the artistic education of foreign travel Rossetti had very little. But in early life he made a short tour in Belgium, where he was indubitably much impressed and influenced by the works of Van Eyck at Ghent and Memling at Bruges. In the spring of 1848 he took an active part in forming the so-called pre-Raphaelite brother- hood, the members of which believed that the time had come for the artist to confront again Nature herself imitating no longer man's imitations of her even though the imitations be those splendid works of the great Raphaelite or post-Raphaelite masters which had hitherto been the inspiration of modern art. The revolution was to be one of motives no less than of methods. Of motive Rossetti was from the first a master. His struggle with methods we have already indicated. To "paint nature as it is around them, with the help of modern science," was the object of the pre-Raphaelites according to Mr Ruskin, but to do so artists require something more than that " earnestness of the men of the 13th and 14th centuries" which Mr Ruskin speaks of: they require knowledge. Without knowledge, as we see in even such a marvellous design as Christ at the Door of Simon the Pharisee (1859), the artistic camel has to be drawn from the artist's inner consciousness, and the result is rarely a satisfactory quadruped. Intensity of seeing does not necessarily imply truth of seeing ; otherwise what phe- nomenon can be more real than Blake's Ghost of a Flea 1 But Rossetti's genius absorbed from pre-Raphaelitism all that it had to give, and then passed on its way towards its own special goal. Often and indeed mostly an artist's true and best education is unlearning rather than learning. It was so in Rossetti's case, though he had the most vivid personality and the rarest imagination of any man of his time. Plastic as molten wax, the mind from the dawn of consciousness begins learning, for good or ill. Youth, therefore, how rich soever in individual force, can no more help being imitative than a river, even though it be the Amazon itself, can help reflecting the scenery through which it flows. The goal before the young Rossetti's eyes (as we see in such designs as Taurello's First Sight of Fortune, 1848, and Cassandra) was to reach through art the forgotten world of old romance that world of wonder and mystery and spiritual beauty which the old masters knew and could have painted had not lack of science, combined with slavery to monkish traditions of asceticism, crippled their strength. And he reached it he reached early that world which not all the pseudo-classicism that arose in the 15th century, ripened in the 16th, and rotted XX. 1 08