Rossetti’s office in the later and further development of romantic art was threefold:  First, to revive and express, both in painting and poetry, the religious spirit of the early Florentine schools; secondly, to give a more intimate interpretation of Dante to the English public, and especially of Dante’s life and personality and of his minor poetry, like the “Vita Nuova,” which had not yet been translated; thirdly, to afford new illustrations of mediaeval life and thought, partly by treating legendary matter in the popular ballad form, and partly by treating romantic matter of his own invention with the rich colour and sensuous imagery which belonged to his pictorial art.

“Perhaps,” writes Mr. Caine,[18] “Catholicism is itself essentially mediaeval, and perhaps a man cannot possibly be a ’mediaeval artist, heart and soul,’ without partaking of a strong religious feeling that is primarily Catholic—­so much were the religion and art of the Middle Ages knit each to each. . . .  Rossetti’s attitude towards spiritual things was exactly the reverse of what we call Protestant. . . .  He constantly impressed me during the last days of his life with the conviction that he was by religious bias of nature a monk of the Middle Ages.”  All this is true in a way, yet Rossetti strikes one as being Catholic, without being religious; as mediaeval rather than Christian.  He was agnostic in his belief and not devout in his practice; so that the wish that he suddenly expressed in his last illness, to confess himself to a priest, affected his friends as a singular caprice.  It was the romantic quality in the Italian sacred art of the Middle Ages that attracted him; and it attracted him as a poet and painter, not as a devotee.  There was little in Rossetti of the mystical and ascetic piety of Novalis or Zacharias Werner; nor of the steady religious devotion of his friend Holman Hunt, or his own sister Christina.

Rossetti, by the way, was never in Italy, though he made several visits to France and Belgium.  A glance at the list of his designs—­extending to some four hundred titles—­in oil, water-colour, crayon, pen and ink, etc., will show how impartially his interest was distributed over the threefold province mentioned above.  There are sacred pieces like “Mary Magdalen at the Door of Simon the Pharisee,” “St. Cecily,” a “Head of Christ,” a “Triptych for Llandaff Cathedral”; Dante subjects such as “Paolo and Francesca,” “Beata Beatrix,” “La Donna della Finestra,” “Giotto Painting the Portrait of Dante”; and, in greater number, compositions of a purely romantic nature—­“Fair Rosamond,” “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” “The Chapel before the Lists,” “Michael Scott’s Wooing,” “Meeting of Sir Tristram and Yseult,” “Lady Lilith,” “The Damozel of the Sanct Grail,” “Death of Breuse sans Pitie,” and the like.