VAST. A tragic love story and a coffin exhumed in “Scorci d’Abruzzo” the Rai format by Paolo Pacitti with Peppe Millanta and the cameras of Sem Cipriani: it is the winter of 1864, in a gray and cloudy London a painter is fighting against his ghosts, despite being 44 years old he is consumed by vices and sadness and defends himself with his brush and his talent, his name is Gabriel Dante Rossetti, one of the most influential painters of the 80s, founder of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, son of Gabriele Rossetti, poet and patriot from Abruzzo exiled in England whose home is in Vasto (Ch) which today houses the European center for Rossettian studies.
Dante’s ghost has a name, Elizabeth Siddal, his wife, muse and model, who died prematurely a few years earlier, and since then Dante has been desperate and obsessed with painting the moment of her death: the painting called “Beata Beatrix” will emerge, one of most significant of the artist who is inspired by Dante Alighieri’s “Vita Nuova”, in the passage in which the great poet dreams of Beatrice’s death.
The one between Dante and Lizzy was a tormented love made up of tensions, excesses and passions: the two met in 1850 when he was an established painter and she was a model of humble origins, since then they never left each other again until their premature death of her who regularly abused laudanum, a mix of alcohol and opium thanks to which she found relief from her increasingly precarious health and which struck her down was almost certainly an overdose, probably voluntary but unspoken. For Dante it was terrible, he buried her together with some poems that he had written for her and which he later recovered alone at night wanting to publish them: legend has it that her body was intact and her red hair was even longer. But what undermined Lizzy’s health was precisely a painting “The Ophelia” inspired by Shakespeare’s tragedy by John Everett Miller which forced her for months to rest immersed in a bathtub every day for endless hours until the young woman he fell ill.
To watch the episode again, the link is https://www.facebook.com/share/v/7339DzSyZFxRkYj6/.
Vasto and Dante Rossetti’s love at “Scorci d’Abruzzo”
Vastoweb
Vasto and Dante Rossetti’s love at “Scorci d’Abruzzo”
Vastoweb
Vasto and Dante Rossetti’s love at “Scorci d’Abruzzo”
Vastoweb
Vasto and Dante Rossetti’s love at “Scorci d’Abruzzo”
Vastoweb
