Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 – 1882) Poet, illustrator, painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti was born in London on May 12, 1828, the second child and eldest son of Italian expatriates Gabriele Rossetti, a Dante scholar who had been exiled from Naples for writing poetry in support of the Neapolitan Constitution of 1819, and Frances Polidori Rossetti, a governess whose father Gaetano Polidori, from Tuscany, had married an English woman. His family’s intellectual heritage profoundly shaped his artistic sensibilities—a legacy that extended beyond mere biographical details to encompass a deep appreciat…