One knows both how competitive the Victorian art world was, with painters keeping their new subjects secret lest another should 'steal' or forestall it, and also how sensitive Rossetti was regarding his reputation, to the extent of declining to exhibit for fear of critical reviews.
it must therefore have been distressing when in 1855 the star picture at the Royal Academy was an ambitious multi-figure piece of a procession set in late medieval Florence, centred on Cimabue and Giotto, the heroes of pre-Raphael art. Whom the PRB had celebrated and elevated by their choice of name.
At the RA to view this marvel, Gabriel and Lizzie ran into Anna Mary Howitt. Surely this subject belonged to the PRB. Was this newcomer, young Frederic Leighton, paying homage or usurping their place ?
Everyone praised the piece, most especially Q Victoria, who wrote in her journal :
'There was a very big picture, by a young man, called Leighton, his 1st attempt … It is a beautiful painting quite reminding one of a Paul Veronese, so bright & full of lights. Albert was enchanted with it - so much so that he made me buy it. The young man’s father said that his future career in life would depend on the success of this picture’.
DGR was 27 this month, increasingly anxious about his future career. Leighton's success at 25 must have really worried him. Moreover, Leighton had not only taken taken 'his' subject, but had also filled the canvas with a virtuoso series of brilliantly executed figures, each a variation on the attitudes that gave history painting its harmonious strengths as pictorial bit-part players in a visual epic. See, for instance, the masterly depiction of a red-clad musician tuning his violin as he walked. DGR could never manage such a sophisticated figure. In addition, young Leighton had also included a couple of horses, in direct emulation of high art, where horses' heads and rears were admired accessories. [Holman Hunt had indeed included a phalanx of equine rumps in his latest picture of Rienzi, to show his skill.]
worst of all, perhaps, on the far right of the canvas Leighton had placed a figure of Dante Alighieri, leaning as it were on the picture frame to watch the whole procession pass. Was this to challenge a fellow painter calling himself Dante Rossetti?
It raised the question whether Leighton, who had lived abroad until this startling debut in London, seen his own picture - a watercolour study for a larger canvas showing Giotto painting Dante's portrait, with Cimabue looking on.
This had been exhibited in a watercolour show in London in winter 1852. Had Leighton seen and noted this, then taken the theme to outdo it?
Rossetti was in fact as impressed as anyone. Viewing it again, he admired 'the great richness of arrangement' and agreed that Leighton was destined for greatness. He himself was busy with other scenes related to Dante, including a sweetly conceived image of two young women by a fountain, figured as Rachel and Leah from the Purgatorio. He was enjoying Ruskin's patronage. But public praise was elusive.
And perhaps the episode was one that helped shape his attitude to ambition, when some while later he told poor James Smetham, who could not rouse himself to confidence, that he lacked ambition, which was not envy, but the simple feeling of rage when others did better, followed by self-analysis and renewed determination. Rossetti had always been competitive, finding in others' achievements a spur to action.
Rossetti spent the next couple of years deep in medievalism, thanks to Ruskin's misconceived but influential notions on the merits of Gothic architecture, his own discovery of Malory's Morte D'Arthur and enthusiastic new admirers William Morris and Burne Jones. He seized, or proposed, the opportunity to create a fresco sequence on the upper walls of the Oxford Union debating chamber and when this fizzled into failure he disappeared for nearly a year, spent with Lizzie Siddal in Derbyshire.
Where, I suggest, he worked principally on the translations that would appear in the volume Early Italian Poetry from Ciullo d'Alcamo to Dante Alighieri. This was his literary claim to innovation. Ruskin promised to subsidise what was a substantial publication. It may have been well advanced by Rossetti's 30th birthday in May 1858. One of his father's favourite aphorisms was 'what you don't do at thirty, you never will do'
Whether titled as 'A Roman Lady' (she looked proud, but every Victorian knew this was no lady) or 'Pavonia', la Nanna was flavour of the season, and a new challenge.
Rossetti rose to it, choosing now to paint in oils and aim for the broad, fluent manner the PRB had reviled. He found Fanny Cornforth as an appropriately sensuous model, and began the sequence of 'Pre-Raphaelite beauties' that would come to define his art.
At the same time, he returned to Giotto painting Dante, re-drafting the composition to centre on the poet and his coeval Guido Cavalcanti, whose sonnets were key elements in Rossetti's translations, together with an imagined image of Giotto, who has surely borrowed some aspects (nose and full beard) from his latest successor, the painter Frederic Leighton.
