File:Dante Gabriel Rossetti - Study for the Head of Dante.jpg

English: See source: According to the artist's brother William Michael Rossetti, the model for the head of Dante in Rossetti's painting was the photographer William Stillman, whilst his studio assistant Henry Treffry Dunn states that it was Charles Augustus Howell. However both these identifications probably relate to an earlier drawing (Victoria & Albert Museum). The most likely sitter for this final drawing was identified by Maria Stillman, according to an annotation on a print of the present drawing (Fogg Art Museum, Harvard) as a professional model called Alessandro. Maria would have had first-hand experience of the other models who posed for the picture as she appears as one of Beatrice's attendants; a study of her head for Dante's Dream was sold in these rooms (17 December 2015, lot 4).
"Alessandro" was Alessandro di Marco, a former organ-grinder from Piedmont who appears to have first modelled for Leighton as a small child in Rome in 1853 for Cimabue's Madonna (Royal Collection, on long-term loan to the National Gallery, London). He seems to have made his way to the ateliers of Paris but as William Blake Richmond recorded; "The war had forced Paris to disgorge the Italian models, who came over to us. There was, indeed, a splendid group of them to choose from, and finding the English pay better than the Parisians, many remained here for years. Among them was Alessandro di Marco, a man who seemed to stride out from Signorelli's grand frescoes, a man whom we all painted and drew from, a fellow so graceful and of such a colour, a kind of bronzegold, having a skin of so fine a texture that the movement of every muscle was not disguised, not a film of fat disfigured his shapely limbs. Only a peasant, people say! Yes--but of a race of Kings--so noble he looked. Alessandro was the most inspiring model I have ever drawn from..." (Simon Reynolds, William Blake Richmond, p.45)
By the late 1860s he was modelling in London for Richmond, Poynter, Leighton, Solomon, Burne-Jones and the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. He was the model for Burne-Jones' Love Among the Ruins (Christie's, 11 July 2013, lot 3) and remarkably for the principal figure in The Renaissance of Venus (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) by Walter Crane, whose wife forbid him to study naked female models.