While Holman Hunt was painting "Rienzi swearing revenge over his brother's corpse," and Millais, "Lorenzo and Isabella," Rossetti began his "Girlhood of Mary Virgin." As can well be imagined that first composition gave him endless trouble and was the cause of the most violent fits of alternate depression and energy. But the following spring (1849), the three pictures were ready for exhibition. Millais and Hunt were hung in the Royal Academy Exhibition and Rossetti's in the so-called Free Exhibition, which was held in a gallery at Hyde Park Corner. In the "Girlhood of Mary Virgin," he represents a room in the Virgin's home with a balcony on which her father, St. Joachim, is seen tending a vine which grows up towards the top of the picture. On the right, against a dark green curtain, are the figures of St. Anna and the Virgin sitting at an embroidery frame. The mother, in dark green and brown garments with a dull red head-dress, is watching with clasped hands the work in front of her. The young girl, a quite unconventional Madonna dressed in grey, pauses with a needle in her hand gazing in front of her at a child angel holding a white lily. Underneath the pot in which the white lily grows are six big books bearing the names of the six cardinal virtues. The figures, as well as the dove which is perched on the trellis, bear halos, their names being inscribed within. Rossetti painted his mother for St. Anna and his sister Christina for the Virgin. Changing her dark brown hair to golden, he broke a rule of the Brotherhood, which decrees that the artist shall copy his model most scrupulously. The picture was signed with his name, followed by the three letters P.R.B. Rossetti having revealed the meaning of these three letters to a friend it was soon generally known and no peace was given to those who dared to stand up against traditional authority. It is necessary to explain that, at that time, Raphael was considered the greatest of all painters. All who came before him were ignored and a set of fixed rules supposed to have been deduced from his work was taught in all the schools. The revolt of the "Brethren" was directed much more against those rules than against Raphael's work which, in all probability, they hardly knew. [Illustration: PLATE III.--DANTE DRAWING THE ANGEL From the water-colour (16½ in. by 24 in.) painted in 1853 and first exhibited in the Pre-Raphaelite Exhibition at Russell Place in 1857. It is now in the Taylorian Museum at Oxford The subject of this water-colour is taken from the following passage in the Vita Nuova: