PRE-RAPHAELITES AND PRE-RAPHAELISM. - These are the terms by which the followers of a particular aesthetic doctrine, and the doctrine itself, are designated; they established themselves in England in the middle of the last century.
It was in fact at that time that a group of young English artists sought to unite in order to oppose the conventions still prevailing in academic and official painting. These young men proposed a return to plastic and decorative pictorial forms exemplified on models earlier than Raphael. As can be seen, a theory that arrived in a certain sense belatedly, after those already taken for granted by the Nazarenes (v.), of Purism (v.), of Ingres (v.) and his followers. But it was above all to Ingres and to the purity of his drawing that they principally looked back. As always happens in such circumstances, the Pre-Raphaelite theory meant something when it served to define the stylistic terms of authentic works of art, and little or nothing in the other cases.
Members of the group of P. — whose members gave it the name of "brotherhood," and who were the first to champion the principles of its theories — were Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82), Holman Hunt, J. Everett Millais, painters, and Thomas Woolner, sculptor. Later James Collinson joined them, while F. N. Brown also came into contact with them. Burne-Jones, a follower of Rossetti, and many other English painters of the middle of the century are also described as P., though they never in fact belonged to the "brotherhood," which moreover was soon dissolved. Rossetti was without doubt the greatest personality of the group and in a certain sense the only one who remained faithful to the initial theories, conceding nothing to realism, in the effort to express the mystery of the human soul by treating historical or biblical subjects derived from poems and legends.
Bibliography2 works
Emilio Lavagnino
PRE-RAPHAELITISM IN LITERATURE
The Pre-Raphaelite movement was to influence English sensibility and taste even beyond the sphere of the figurative arts, and it is characteristic that the literary tendencies of the Pre-Raphaelites in painting are matched by pictorial and illustrative tendencies in their poetry (thus Rossetti as well as Morris are at once artists and poets).
Pre-Raphaelitism united only for a short time the all-too-different individuals who represented it, and the review they founded, The Germ, had an ephemeral life. Even the mystical foundation of their art becomes clouded with sensuality, to the point that they become akin to the paganizing and "satanic" Swinburne, and in 1871 they are violently attacked by a critic under the designation of The fleshy school of poetry. Having set out from the defense of an ethical and social art inspired by the Middle Ages, and therefore supported and defended by Ruskin, out of hatred for the industrialism of the age, they end up failing in their theoretical premises, supporting and feeding a sort of mystique of art for art's sake. The symbolism of their works is reduced to a mystifying aestheticism or a mannered exoticism, welcomes currents and incorporates demands contrasting with the ethical and religious premises that were at its origins. Unlike French Impressionism, Pre-Raphaelitism had no perceptible resonance in continental Europe.
Bibliography4 works
Augusto Guidi