THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD

In the middle of the 19th century, the Royal Academy of Arts in London represented the
ultimate standard in art. Esteemed Academicians taught interested students the fundamentals of
painting, perspective, anatomy, geometry, and sculpture. But the view of art promoted by the
Academy was very restrictive (the style of painting idealised nature and beauty to the detriment
of truth); not surprisingly, there were students at the Academy who were disillusioned with this
outlook, and who rebelled against the Academicians.

In 1848, a group of young artists and writers expressed their protest against
conventional art and academic rules imposed by the Royal Academy of Art and founded
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a movement aiming at regenerating art by infusing it
with sincere ardour, simplicity and a scrupulous description of nature. The members of
the group declared their reliance on the Italian art of the 14 th and 15th centuries, and their
adoption of the name Pre-Raphaelite expressed their admiration for what they saw as the
simple and uncomplicated depiction of nature typical of Italian painting before the High
Renaissance and, particularly, before the time of Raphael1.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) was founded by William Holman Hunt
(1827-1910, painter), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (painter and poet), John Everett Millais
(1829-1896, painter), William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Thomas Woolner
(sculptor and poet), and F. G. Stephens, with the explicit purpose of revitalizing the arts
(Even though D.G. Rossetti’s sister, Christina, never was an official member of the
Brotherhood, she was a crucial member of the inner circle). In addition to the formal
members of the PRB, other artists and writers formed part of a larger Pre-Raphaelite
circle, including the painters Ford Maddox Brown and Charles Collins, the artist and
social critic John Ruskin, the painter-poet William Bell Scott, and the sculptor poet John
Lucas Tupper.
Their works and memoirs show that they hoped to create an art suitable for the
modern age by:

1
Raffaello Sanzio (short: Raphael)– painter of the Italian High Renaissance, primarily known for his
madonnas.
 1. defying all conventions of art;
2. emphasizing a precise, almost photographic representation of even humble
objects, particularly those in the immediate foreground (which, traditionally, had
been left blurred or covered in shades).
3. finding inspiration in the works of the anonymous medieval artists (the so-called
Primitives), animated by fidelity to nature.
4. producing a mystical or symbolic realism (the flowers around a model may
represent qualities such as innocence, youth).
5. believing that the arts were closely allied; the PRB encouraged artists and writers
to practice each other’s art, though only D.G. Rossetti did so with particular
success.
6. relying on direct observation in order to produce works of art.

The movement as such developed in two stages, the transition between the two
being marked by D.G. Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix (painting). The first stage was more
realistic and marked by a luminosity of colour spread all over the composition of a
painting and an attention to detail. The second stage was more mystical and esoteric, with
realism being replaced by a dream-like atmosphere and mystery.
As a general coordinate of the group, it might be argued that it included artists
who revolted against the utilitarian2 doctrine that had become prevalent up to that time.
They pleaded for a language of emotion and emphasized feeling through their insistence
on the physical details of the paintings. In reacting against utilitarianism, they sometimes
took refuge in imaginary worlds of classical inspiration, thus escaping reality. But they
did not promote a complete detachment from the fundamental concerns of society that
had become the major focus of Victorian writers.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood published a journal in support of their theories,
The Germ, whose first number appeared on the 1st of January 1850. This first issue
contained a manifesto of the movement, proclaiming “an entire adherence to the

2
A theory (deriving somehow from hedonism) according to which the proper course of action is the one
that maximizes the overall „happiness”; in this context, an action is good if it produces happiness and
wrong if it produces pain.
simplicity of art”. The same first issue also published Rossetti’s poem, My Sister’s Sleep,
which was a combination between realistic depiction and pictorial effects.
Their style had a wide influence and gained many followers during the 1850s and
early ’60s, being associated toward the end of the century with the Decadence.

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

(1828-1882)

Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, who later changed the order of his names to
stress his kinship with the great Italian poet, was born in London, on May 12, 1828, to
Gabriele and Frances (Polidori) Rossetti. Rossetti’s father was an Italian patriot exiled
from Naples for his political activity and a Dante scholar who became professor of Italian
at King’s College, London, in 1831. Since Mrs. Rossetti was also half-Italian, the
children (Maria, Dante Gabriel, William Michael, and Christina) grew up fluent in both
English and Italian. Although the family was certainly not wealthy, Professor Rossetti
was able to support the family comfortably until his eyesight and general health
deteriorated in the 1840’s.
D. G. Rossetti attended King’s College School from 1837 to 1842, after which he
prepared for the Royal Academy. In 1846 he was accepted into the Royal Academy but
was there only a year before he became dissatisfied with the principles taught there and
left. In 1848 he, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais began to call themselves
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. This group attracted other young painters, poets, and
critics; William Michael Rossetti acted as secretary and later historian for the group.
In 1849 and 50 D.G.R. exhibited his first important paintings, The Girlhood of
Mary Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini. At about the same time he met Elizabeth Eleanor
Siddal, who became a model for many of his paintings and sketches. They were engaged
in 1851 but did not marry until 1860, approximately 20 months before she died from a
self-administered overdose of morphia on February 10, 1862. After her death, Rossetti
continued painting and writing poetry, gaining enough patrons to become relatively
prosperous.
 Rossetti’s paintings and choice of models changed the concept of feminine beauty
in the Victorian period to the tall, thin, long-necked, long-haired women who seem to be
of frail health; such women are to be seen in paintings like Beata Beatrix, Pandora,
Proserpine, La Pia, and La Donna della Finestra.
In the late 1860’s D.G. Rossetti began to suffer from headaches and his eyesight
deteriorated; he began to take chloral mixed with whiskey to cure insomnia. Chloral
accentuated the depression that was latent in Rossetti’s nature, and Robert Buchanan’s
attack on Rossetti and Swinburne in “The Fleshly School of Poetry” (1871) changed him
completely. In the summer of 1872 Rossetti suffered a mental breakdown, complete with
hallucinations, after which he was taken to Scotland, where he attempted suicide;
however, he gradually recovered and within a few months was able to paint again. His
health continued to deteriorate slowly (he was still taking chloral), but did not much
interfere with his work. He died of kidney failure on April 9, 1882.

WORKS
As mentioned above, D.G. Rossetti had a double vocation, i.e. poetry and
painting, which resulted in an original art and complicated symbolism. He wrote sonnets
for his own paintings and verses for the paintings of Leonardo and Boticelli, as an
attempt to capture in words the meaning of the paintings.
His poetry is suffused with a kind of mysticism often expressed by means of
symbols. The careful rendering of detail (both 3 in painting and in poetry) and the focus on
the senses bring him closer to Raphael’s predecessors.
One of his earliest poems was The Blessed Damozel, published in The Germ in
1850, which Rossetti associated with Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven. Rossetti’s poem is
focused on the description of a woman in heaven “one of God’s choristers”, watching her
lover on earth.
In 1861 he published his first volume of verses, The Early Italian Poets, a
collection of translations from Dante (including La vita nuova). His first volume of
strictly original poetry was published in 1870 under the title Poems by D.G. Rossetti.

3
D.G. Rossetti himself proposed the association between the two poems, though the situations are not
identical: in The Raven, Poe is concerned with the grief of the lover on earth, whereas in My Blessed
Damozel the poet reproduces the grief of the ‘blessed damozel’, who is in heaven.
That same year he published The House of Life, a long sonnet sequence, his masterpiece.
The theme of the sonnets is passionate love, and the sources are personal, as well as
literary, originating in the Italian tradition of sonnets. In Rossetti’s opinion, each sonnet is
“a moment’s monumentum/memorial from the Soul’s eternity”.
In 1881 he also published “Ballads and Sonnets” as a completion to the sequence
of love sonnets from the House of Life. This time, Ballads and Sonnets seems to be
dominated by a sense of magic that is derived from old ballads and tales of witchcraft.
This volume contains the sonnet “Sister Helen and Rose Mary”, which came to be
appreciated for its component of magic.
Rossetti’s artistic activity also encompasses the translations from Dante and
Dante’s predecessors, as well as a translation of Francois Villon.
In the eighties, the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood came to be associated with the
Decadence, with art for art’s sake (creating art out of pure interest, and detached from all
concerns of the epoch). Even though Rossetti did not openly associate himself with the
movement, he had indeed isolated himself from the preoccupations of the age, namely
from those preoccupations that were to exert an enormous influence on the novelists of
the period, for example.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an illustrative representative of the pre-Raphaelites.
his contribution to the development of this movement is best summed up in Ifor Evan’s
words: “The term pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood would not enter into the history of English
poetry except for two accidents: first, Rossetti was a poet, and had been engaged in
writing verse from his earliest days as a painter, and secondly, he was fortunate in
influencing forward minds in poetry as well as in painting”4.
There have been opinions according to which Rossetti’s imagery is obscure and
vague, but it should be noted that the poet managed to express human emotions in
relation to those events that shape our mortal life: love, change and death.

4
Quoted in Ileana Galea, Victorianism and Literature.