![]() The Pre-Raphaelite emphasis on truth to nature was for her misguided if art succeeded at all, it was by being symbolic, not naturalistic or beautiful. In this she was heavily influenced by the Tractarians, with their doctrine of reserve, according to which divine truth was encoded in the visible world to be deciphered only by the faithful. ![]() After the mysterious breakdown she suffered in her teens, described by one doctor as ‘religious mania’, she went from being a lively girl to a pious and solemn young woman who abhorred anything that smacked of vanity. But her private attitude to art was, like everything in her life, deeply shaped by her faith. ![]() She contributed poems to its short-lived journal, The Germ, and modelled for a number of paintings, her features arguably contributing to what became the standard Pre-Raphaelite representation of women. ![]() Her other brother, William, was the PRB’s amanuensis and unofficial spokesman. ‘Rarely, if ever, has a major poet grown up so deeply embedded in an avant-garde visual culture,’ writes Nicholas Tromans in Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art, a collection of five essays exploring different aspects of Rossetti’s relationship to art. Portrait of Christina Rossetti (1877), Dante Gabriel Rossetti ![]()
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