The Pre-Raphaelites
'Echo and Narcissus' 1903 by John William Waterhouse (1849 - 1917)
• The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in John Millais's
parents' house in London in 1848.
• At the initial meeting John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel
Rossetti and William Holman Hunt were present.
• A few months later other artists (poets, painters and critics)
joined the group with the aim of resisting the conventions and
the ugly noisy world of industrial England.
• These artists glorified the values of a simple but more
beautiful past.
• They called themselves Pre-Raphaelites as they thought that
since the Italian painter Raphael (1483-1520) art had
degenerated losing its ties with nature.
• According to them, Raphael had painted religious pictures
with incredible perfection in technique, but with almost
cynical disregard for spiritual feeling.
• The essence of the Brotherhood was, therefore,
opposition to technical skill without inspiration.
• They aimed at “Truth to Nature”, i.e. representing
nature in a realistic way.
• This could be achieved through a minute
description of detail in nature
• they wanted to return to the abundant detail and
intense colours of the early XV century Italian art.
• They painted only serious - usually religious or
romantic – subjects.
• Their paintings were also rich in symbolism.
• The Brotherhood's early doctrines were
expressed in four points:
1. To have genuine ideas to express;
2. To study Nature attentively, so as to know how
to express them (i.e. their ideas);
3. To sympathise with what was direct and
serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the
exclusion of what was conventional and
learned by rote;
4. And, most indispensable of all, to produce
thoroughly good pictures and statues.
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The Pre-Raphaelites worshipped beauty
above everything not only in painting but
also in poetry.
For them beauty had a social function,
because it improved society.
Therefore, they paid great attention to the
formal aspects of their poems and
experimented in metres and rhymes.
The result was a poetry which gave particular
importance to details and was characterized
by:
1. sensuousness,
2. images and sounds suggesting physical
pleasure,
3. pictorial qualities,
• Their poetry was also rich in symbols,
• Because, through it, they wanted to express a
very profound spiritual reality and their
themes, like in painting, were mainly:
• medieval,
• biblical,
• mystical.
• In conclusion, the term “Pre-Raphaelite” became
synonymous with a rejection of the external squalor
caused by the Industrial Revolution.
• In their search for beauty and sensuousness they
anticipated the later aesthetic movement.
• The Pre-Raphaelites published their doctrines in a
magazine called “The Germ”.