H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: ROSSETTI

 G.: Rossetti is a common enough surname, which is precisely why one must be fussy at the beginning and genealogical before luncheon. S.: Then the Rossetti you want for the London branch is not your Vastese cave-hunter, but Gabriele Rossetti, born at Vasto in 1783 and dead in London in 1854. [en.wikipedia.org] G.: Exactly. He is the direct Italian-born progenitor of the Rossetti family in London that produces Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, and Maria Francesca Rossetti. [en.wikipedia.org], [browningsc...ndence.com] S.: So the bare genealogy runs like this: Gabriele Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti, Italian exile from Vasto, marries Frances Mary Lavinia Polidori, daughter of Gaetano Polidori, another Italian man of letters settled in London. [en.wikipedia.org] G.: And from that marriage come the four London children, all born in England, though in a household so Italian that England must have seemed a local inconvenience. [amershammuseum.org], [browningsc...ndence.com] S.: Let us state them properly, since the Victorians liked order when it could be made familial: Maria Francesca Rossetti, born 1827; Dante Gabriel Rossetti, born 1828; William Michael Rossetti, born 1829; Christina Rossetti, born 1830. [en.wikipedia.org], [browningsc...ndence.com] G.: A very productive domestic republic, and rather more successful than several political ones. S.: Then the first answer to Speranza’s question is plain. The direct Italian-born ancestor of the Pre-Raphaelite Rossettis is Gabriele Rossetti, not any other Rossetti of Vasto or Venice or elsewhere. [en.wikipedia.org] G.: Quite. And his branch originates in Vasto, in Abruzzo, in the old Kingdom of Naples, before it becomes intellectually portable and politically inconvenient. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com] S.: Which already matters, because Gabriele Rossetti is not an incidental immigrant but an exile, a patriot, a Dante scholar, a teacher of Italian, and a man whose whole London existence is conditioned by having been born elsewhere. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com] G.: Precisely. One should not sentimentalise exile, but one should also not treat it as mere postal redirection. S.: He leaves the Kingdom of Naples after the constitutional crisis of 1821, spends time in Malta, and reaches London in 1824. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com] G.: There to support himself by teaching Italian and eventually by becoming Professor of Italian at King’s College London. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com] S.: Which is already enough to make him an English type under foreign description: the exile who becomes an institution. G.: England likes those, provided they teach grammar and not insurrection. S.: And Frances Polidori complicates the genealogy nicely, because she too comes from an Italian expatriate family, though more mixed. Her father Gaetano Polidori was Tuscan by origin and Londonised by long residence. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com] G.: So the children are not simply “English children of an Italian father,” but products of a bilingual, bicultural, Anglo-Italian household in London. [amershammuseum.org], [english.cam.ac.uk] S.: Dante Gabriel Rossetti himself was born Gabriele Charles Dante Rossetti, and later rearranged the names to stress the Dantesque lineage rather than the Charlian compromise. [browningsc...ndence.com] G.: One of the few respectable cases of self-revision by baptismal order. S.: Then how Italian did Gabriele Rossetti think he was in England? G.: Very Italian indeed, though the matter needs nuance. He remained an Italian patriot, wrote on Dante, taught Italian, and lived in the London Italian exile community. He did not become English in the sense of surrendering his origin. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com], [amershammuseum.org] S.: Yet he also became, institutionally and domestically, rather London. G.: Yes. One may be deeply Italian in allegiance and still be functionally London in address, timetable, salary, and burial. S.: That is already almost Victorian. G.: Exiles often become Victorian faster than Victorians do. S.: And the children? G.: The children are the really interesting case. They were born and lived in London, yet grew up in a household steeped in Italian language, literature, politics, names, and visitors. [amershammuseum.org], [english.cam.ac.uk], [browningsc...ndence.com] S.: So Dante Gabriel Rossetti is English by birth and cultural circumstance, but Italian by household atmosphere, paternal mythology, and chosen affiliation. [amershammuseum.org], [browningsc...ndence.com] G.: Exactly. He is the kind of Englishman who could never have been merely English without loss of imaginative force. S.: Which perhaps explains why only an Italian can be not a post-Raphaelite, but a pre-one. G.: That is excellent and very silly, which is the proper combination. S.: Thank you. G.: Keep it. The “Pre-Raphaelite” business itself profits from the Italian connection, because Dante Gabriel Rossetti does not merely admire medieval and early Renaissance Italy as an English aesthete might; he inherits it domestically as a family condition. [victorianweb.org], [browningsc...ndence.com] S.: So “Pre-Raphaelite” for him is not only art history but a kind of return to the father’s country by paint, poem, and translation. G.: Very much so. There is something almost genealogically indecent in the neatness of it. S.: Then why did it matter in London that the father was Italian? G.: In several ways. First, it made the household culturally anomalous. Their English acquaintances repeatedly remarked the family’s cosmopolitanism, foreignness, and oddity. [english.cam.ac.uk], [amershammuseum.org] S.: Which London noticed even when trying to flatter it. G.: Especially then. English admiration of foreigners is often a polite form of taxidermy. S.: The Cambridge Rossetti conference background is useful here: it notes that the family’s social and cultural anomalousness struck many English contemporaries, and that even the pronunciation of the surname became a small battle between Italian softness and Anglo-Saxon hardening. [english.cam.ac.uk] G.: Pronunciation is where nationality takes petty revenge. S.: So even “Rossetti” itself became a little test case. G.: Yes. To say it properly was to grant the family a continued Italianity; to say it badly was to naturalise them by violence. S.: A very English form of hospitality. G.: Quite. S.: Second, the Italian father gave the children an actual line back to Dante Alighieri, to Italian medieval poetry, to political exile, and to romantic nationalism. G.: Yes, and not merely as reading matter. Gabriele Rossetti wrote commentaries on Dante, speculated on hidden anti-papal codes, and filled the house with Italian literary and political atmosphere. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com] S.: So Dante Gabriel Rossetti inherits not just a name but a programme. G.: Or at least a set of temptations. That is often closer to family life. S.: Third, it mattered because the English saw him as both one of them and not one of them. G.: Exactly. Dante Gabriel Rossetti is accepted into English artistic life, co-founds the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, paints English models, writes in English, but remains marked by Italian origins enough to be continuously described through them. [victorianweb.org], [browningsc...ndence.com] S.: Which makes him peculiarly fit to found a movement that wishes to go back before Raphael. G.: Because going back before Raphael is, for an Englishman of ordinary pedigree, an art-historical preference; for Rossetti, it is also a family route into Italy before academies became too tidy. [victorianweb.org], [browningsc...ndence.com] S.: So his Italianity mattered aesthetically as a source of permission. G.: Very well put. It gave him permission to make Italian medievalism feel less like tourism and more like domestic archaeology. S.: Yet surely he was not simply “Italian” in London. G.: No, and here one must be careful. He was not Gabriele Rossetti transplanted. He was London-born, London-educated, English-speaking, institutionally English, and artistically formed in the Victorian metropolis. [browningsc...ndence.com], [victorianweb.org] S.: So if some Englishmen thought him wholly foreign, they were being lazy. G.: As Englishmen often are when nationality becomes decorative. S.: But if others thought him wholly English, they were also being lazy. G.: Exactly. The Rossetti case punishes the appetite for one label. S.: Then perhaps the cleanest formula is that Gabriele Rossetti remained an Italian in London, while Dante Gabriel Rossetti became an English artist under constitutive Italian conditions. [en.wikipedia.org], [browningsc...ndence.com] G.: That is excellent. S.: Thank you. G.: Keep it, with the usual reductions in flourish. S.: Happily. Then let us say more about the family branch itself. Do we know more of the line in Vasto? G.: Public summaries are often thin, but there is enough to say the branch is Vastese and Abruzzese, not Florentine, Venetian, or Roman. Gabriele Rossetti is described as born in Vasto, son of a blacksmith, clever enough to study in Naples. [britannica.com], [wikitree.com] S.: So not a patrician Roman Rossetti then. G.: No. Which is a useful correction to any aristocratic fantasy induced by later Victorian frames. S.: Though one web source rather grandly calls him “Italian nobleman.” [en.wikipedia.org] G.: Web sources often give nobility the way grocers give parsley. S.: Sensible. Then the more reliable line is modest but ambitious: Vasto, literary talent, Naples, politics, exile, London. [britannica.com] G.: Exactly. A very nineteenth-century route, though not one English domestic ideology was eager to advertise. S.: Because the family in London was full of Italian academics, exiles, and politics, not just tea and childhood. [amershammuseum.org] G.: Yes. The Amersham Museum piece nicely notes that the house was usually full of Italians debating politics and art and declaiming poetry. That is not quite a normal English nursery. [amershammuseum.org] S.: More a domestic Risorgimento with drawing-room upholstery. G.: Precisely. S.: Then the Londoners thought him Italian enough to be marked, but English enough to exhibit. G.: Very good. The foreign father made the household romantically interesting; the London birth of the children made them safely usable by English culture. S.: So Dante Gabriel Rossetti could become a major English painter-poet while still carrying the aura of Mediterranean difference. [victorianweb.org], [browningsc...ndence.com] G.: Yes, and that aura helped. English culture likes foreignness best when it can own it by birth certificate. S.: Then how Italian did Dante Gabriel Rossetti himself think he was? G.: Not simply or programmatically Italian in the father’s political sense, but profoundly attached to Italian literary and artistic lineage. He changed the order of his names to foreground Dante, translated early Italian poets, and made Italian medievalism central to his art. [victorianweb.org], [browningsc...ndence.com] S.: Which is more than decorative surname loyalty. G.: Much more. It is elective cultural filiation. S.: Yet he never went to Vasto, it seems. G.: The recent Palazzo Florio note says the bond was spiritual rather than physical and that he never visited Vasto. One treats such local commemorative writing with due caution, but the point sounds plausible enough. [palazzoflo...iovasto.it] S.: So he belonged to Italy imaginatively, genealogically, linguistically, artistically, but not by residence. G.: Exactly. Which is the most Victorian way of belonging to anything. S.: And what of William Michael Rossetti? G.: A useful reminder that the family Italianity was not confined to the painter-poet. William Michael Rossetti was heavily involved in the Pre-Raphaelite movement as editor, secretary, and historian. The family as a whole matters, not just the luminous brother. [italymagazine.com], [browningsc...ndence.com] S.: And Christina Rossetti, of course, is no minor appendix. G.: Certainly not. But Dante is the usual centre because his very name makes the genealogy theatrically useful. S.: “Dante Gabriel Rossetti” already sounds like the whole argument in five syllables too many. G.: Exactly. It is an English artistic persona wearing Italian ancestry without apology. S.: Then let us be dry and explicit. The genealogy for Speranza could be put thus: Gabriele Rossetti, born Vasto, marries Frances Polidori, daughter of Gaetano Polidori, and their London-born children include Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelite founder. [en.wikipedia.org], [browningsc...ndence.com] G.: Yes. Add that both paternal and maternal lines were Italian or Anglo-Italian exile-literary lines, so the London branch is not the accident of one foreign father but a whole expatriate milieu. [amershammuseum.org], [english.cam.ac.uk] S.: Which helps explain why the household is bilingual and culturally anomalous. [amershammuseum.org], [english.cam.ac.uk] G.: Exactly. S.: Now, did Gabriele Rossetti think himself English at all? G.: In the thin civic sense, perhaps increasingly as resident, employee, husband, father, and scholar. But the available summaries stress rather his persistence as Italian patriot, exile, and professor of Italian. He is not presented as an assimilated English man of letters who happened to be born abroad. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com] S.: So England gave him platform, not replacement identity. G.: Nicely put. S.: And Londoners? G.: Londoners likely thought him emphatically Italian, though in the respectable form of “Professor of Italian,” which is a much more manageable kind of foreignness than revolutionary refugee with active opinions. S.: The family, then, occupies that interesting English category: foreign enough to fascinate, useful enough to install. G.: Yes. We are very good at that category. S.: Then the phrase “how un-Italian Rossetti thought he was” probably needs division between father and son. G.: Exactly. The father did not think himself un-Italian. The son could not think himself simply Italian without absurdity, but neither could he think himself merely English without diminution. S.: So Dante Gabriel Rossetti is the child of an Italian father and a London literary-exile house, not the negation of Italianity but its translated continuation. [amershammuseum.org], [browningsc...ndence.com] G.: Very well put. S.: Thank you. G.: Again, keep it. S.: Then why did it matter for the Pre-Raphaelite story specifically? G.: Because the movement’s appeal to pre-Raphaelite art, early Italian painting, medieval devotion, and anti-academic sincerity becomes less a purely English rebellion when one of its founders carries actual domestic Italy into the studio. [victorianweb.org], [browningsc...ndence.com] S.: So Rossetti gives the Brotherhood an internal Italian corridor. G.: Exactly. The corridor is part family, part philology, part fantasy, but it is there. S.: Only an Italian can be not a post-Raphaelite, but a pre-one. G.: I wish I had said that first. S.: You may still appropriate it Englishly. G.: I prefer licensed looting. But yes, there is something fittingly Rossettian in founding a movement that defines itself by going back before Raphael under the sign of Dante. [victorianweb.org], [browningsc...ndence.com] S.: It sounds almost too designed. G.: Families sometimes overperform their symbolism for later critics. S.: And Vasto naturally now claims the lot. G.: As towns should. Local patriotism is the mildest useful vanity. S.: The Italy Magazine piece on Vasto celebrating the family does exactly that: it traces the line from Gabriele Rossetti of Vasto to the English-born children who stirred Victorian London. [italymagazine.com] G.: Quite right too. It is one of the few civic uses of art history that does not immediately become intolerable. S.: Then if Speranza wishes to have one Rossetti dialogue with Grice and another somewhere else, he is justified. G.: Entirely. Rossetti is common enough as a surname, but the Rossetti of Pre-Raphaelite London is genealogically specific: Gabriele Rossetti of Vasto, his marriage into the Polidori line, and the four London-born children. [en.wikipedia.org], [browningsc...ndence.com] S.: So he should not confuse Domenico Rossetti or other Rossettis with the Vastese-London exile branch. G.: Correct. Surnames invite sloth; genealogy corrects it. S.: There is also the point that the English often treated “Italian” as a general atmospheric category, not a specific provincial one. G.: Exactly. Vasto, Naples, Tuscany, London — the distinctions mattered deeply to Italians and much less to Victorians except when picturesque. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com] S.: So Gabriele Rossetti may have felt intensely southern and Neapolitan in ways London flattened into “Italian professor.” [britannica.com] G.: A very good point. National labels in exile are often produced by the host as much as by the exile. S.: Then the father’s Italianity is politically and regionally rich; the son’s is culturally elective and artistically generative. G.: Excellent. S.: Thank you. G.: We are nearly done. Let us have the dry final formulation. S.: Very well. The Rossetti who matters for the Pre-Raphaelite genealogy is Gabriele Rossetti, born in Vasto, Abruzzo, exiled from the Kingdom of Naples, settled in London, and married to Frances Polidori, daughter of Gaetano Polidori. Their London-born son Dante Gabriel Rossetti becomes co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The father remained fundamentally Italian in political and literary allegiance; the son was English by birth and practice, but constitutively Italianate in household, language, literary inheritance, and artistic self-fashioning. London thought the father unmistakably Italian and the son usefully, intriguingly, not quite not so. [en.wikipedia.org], [amershammuseum.org], [britannica.com], [english.cam.ac.uk], [browningsc...ndence.com] G.: Admirably done. S.: And the punchline? G.: In England the father was too Italian to be ordinary, and the son too English to be foreign; which is perhaps exactly why only a Rossetti could help found a Brotherhood dedicated to being before Raphael without ever ceasing to be after tea. [victorianweb.org], [browningsc...ndence.com]