Dante, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Their Verbal/Visual Personae

Abstract

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Dante Alighieri. The New Life (La Vita Nuova), published in The Early Italian Poets from Ciullo D’Alcamo to Dante Alighieri (1100-1200-1300) (1847-48, published 1861) and the innumerable sketches, drawings, and paintings he dedicated to Dante generate connections between two different epochs and cultural areas. Puzzling and enlightening, they are verbal and visual transpositions as well as original works of art that invite an enquiry into Rossetti’s interart, transcultural, and self-reflexive appropriation and re-shaping of Dante’s poetics and aesthetics.