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 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.
Rossetti's poem "The Blessed Damozel" typifies the medievalism, the pictorial realism with symbolic overtones, and the union of flesh and spirit, sensuousness and religiousness, associated with the earlier writings of this school.
Comments