Pre-Raphaelites
An examination of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1848), their artistic and literary ideals, and key figures including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, William Morris, and Algernon Swinburne.
pre-raphaelites:
In 1848 a group of English artists, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Millais, organized the “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.” Their aim was to replace the reigning academic style of painting by a return to the truthfulness, simplicity, and spirit of devotion which they attributed to Italian painting before the time of Raphael (1483–1520) and the other painters of the high Italian Renaissance. The ideals of this group of painters were taken over by a literary movement which included Dante Gabriel Rossetti himself (who was a poet as well as a painter), his sister Christina Rossetti, William Morris, and Algernon Swinburne. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem “The Blessed Damozel” typifies the medievalism, the pictorial realism with symbolic overtones, and the union of flesh and spirit, sensuousness and religiosity, associated with the earlier writings of this school. Other examples are Christina Rossetti’s remarkable poem “Goblin Market” (1862) and William Morris’ narrative in verse The Earthly Paradise (1868–70).