PRE-RAPHAELITISM AND SYMBOLIC REALISM
Subject: English
Poetry Siglos XIX y XX Group: A
Student’s name: Cuñat
Manzanera, Sandra
Title of the Paper: Pre-
Raphaelitism and Symbolic Realism
Topic:
Pre-Raphaelitism, the movement of the Victorian Era and Symbolic realism.
Introduction to Pre-Raphaelitism
Pre-Raphaelitism is a movement
of the Victgorian Era in which Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood took place. It took
place in the middle nineteenth century, during the Victorian Era. The term Pre-Raphaelitism originated
in relation with Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Who are the Pre-Raphaelites?
The
Pre-Raphaelites are a group of painters and writers that formed part of the
Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. These artists share characteristics in painting as
well as in literature. Their art is influenced by literature. The
Pre-Raphaelites have been considered the first avant-garde movement in art, though they
have also been denied that status, because they continued to accept both the
concepts of history painting
and of mimesis, or imitation of nature, as central
to the purpose of art. However, the Pre-Raphaelites undoubtedly defined themselves
as a reform movement, created a distinct name for their form of art, and
published a periodical, The Germ,
to promote their ideas. Their debates were recorded in the Pre-Raphaelite
Journal.
Beginnings of the Brotherhood
The
Pre-Raphaelite brothehood was formed in the middle of the 19th
century, in 1848. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
was formed by many authors, but the ones that founded it were Holman Hunt, John
Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson,
Thomas Woolner and F.G. Stephens.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in John
Millais's parents' house on Gower Street,
London in 1848. At the initial meeting John Everett
Millais, Dante Gabriel
Rossetti and William Holman Hunt
were present. Hunt and Millais were students at the Royal Academy of
Arts. They had previously met in another loose association, a
sketching society called the Cyclographic club. Rossetti was a pupil of Ford Madox Brown. He had met Hunt after
seeing Hunt's painting The Eve of St Agnes,
based on Keats' poem. As an aspiring poet, Rossetti wished to develop the links
between Romantic poetry and art. By autumn four
more members had also joined to form a seven-strong Brotherhood. These were William Michael
Rossetti (Dante Gabriel Rossetti's brother), Thomas Woolner, James Collinson and Frederic George
Stephens. Ford Madox Brown was invited to join, but preferred to
remain independent. He nevertheless remained close to the group. Some other
young painters and sculptors were also close associates, including Charles Allston
Collins, Thomas Tupper
and Alexander Munro.
They kept the existence of the Brotherhood secret from members of the Royal
Academy.
Intention
of the Brotherhood
These authors formed this
brotherhood to revitalize the arts, they wanted to create an art suitable for the modern age by:
1. Testing
and defying all conventions of art; for example, if the Royal Academy schools
taught art students to compose paintings with (a) pyramidal groupings of
figures, (b) one major source of light at one side matched by a lesser one on
the opposite, and (c) an emphasis on rich shadow and tone at the expense of
color, the PRB with brilliant perversity painted bright-colored, evenly lit
pictures that appeared almost flat.
2. The
PRB also emphasized precise, almost photographic representation of even humble
objects, particularly those in the immediate foreground (which were
traditionally left blurred or in shade) --thus violating conventional views of
both proper style and subject.
3. Following
Ruskin, they attempted to transform the resultant hard-edge realism (created by
1 and 2) by combining it with typological symbolism.
At their most successful, the PRB produced a magic or symbolic realism, often
using devices found in the poetry of Tennyson
and Browning.
4. 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.
5. Looking
for new subjects, they drew upon Shakespeare, Keats, and Tennyson.
The group's intention was to
reform art by rejecting what they considered to be the mechanistic approach
first adopted by the Mannerist artists who
succeeded Raphael and Michelangelo. They believed that the Classical poses and elegant compositions of
Raphael in particular had been a corrupting influence on academic teaching of art. Hence the name
"Pre-Raphaelite". In particular they objected to the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds,
the founder of the English Royal Academy of
Arts. The Brotherhood's early doctrines were
expressed in four declarations:
1.
To have genuine ideas to express;
2.
To study Nature attentively, so as to
know how to express them;
3.
To sympathise with what is direct and
serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional
and self-parodying and learned by rote;
4.
And, most indispensable of all, to
produce thoroughly good pictures and statues.
These principles are deliberately
undogmatic, since the Brotherhood wished to emphasise the personal
responsibility of individual artists to determine their own ideas and method of
depiction. Influenced by Romanticism, they thought that freedom and
responsibility were inseparable.
Stages of the Movement.
Pre-Raphaelite
brotherhood can be divided into two stages. The first stage started with the
foundation of the brotherhood in 1848. In this stage the intention of the
artists is “to create an art suitable for the modern age”, these artists are,
for exmple, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, George Meredith,
William Morris or Algernonn Charles Swinburne. Many authors were being included
in this circle as the time went by, Madox Brown and Charles Collins, John
Ruskin, or Edward Burne-Jones are some examples of these authors.
The second stage of the
movement was called Aesthetic Pre-Raphaelitism. This second stage grew out
under the direction of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and was during this stage when
the Arts and Craft Movement, modern functional design, and the Aesthetes and
Decadents were produced. Themes of eroticized medievalism and pictorial
techniques that produced moody athmosphere were emphasized by authors like
Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Burne-Jones. This second stage is the most relevant
stage for poetry, it is here where combinations of realistic style and
elaborate symbolism are seen, mostly in Rossetis’ poems.
Coventry Patmore, who was well
acquainted with the young men who formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
before they became famous, deserves a special place in the history of the
movement. young poet who provided the subject of one of the first PRB pictures.
In Pre-Raphaelitism and the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Hunt recalls that "Patmore's Woodsman's Daughter
was a novel interest to all of us eager to find new poems"
Pre-Raphaelitism in painting and in literature.
The Pre-Raphaelites and their
followers relied strongly on narrative sources for paintings. They also created
groups of paintings, those discussed here ranging from two to eight, that
together convey a narrative. By painting works that not only draw from texts
but relate to other paintings, these artists demonstrated with their art a
strong desire to make connections. By creating art with strong connections to
texts and other paintings, the Pre-Raphaelites and their associates created art
that expanded outside the scope of a single canvas, hence heightening the
gravitas, complexity and significance of their works, as well as increasing the
demands made upon the viewer. These connections among paintings and texts
function in several distinctive ways to achieve this heightened complexity:
serial paintings expand upon texts; they manipulate time in ways different from
those used in single paintings; and most significantly, they maintain their
ties to these texts. In many series, the paintings and the texts they use for
inspiration complement one another. the Pre-Raphaelite preoccupation with
creating archaeologically accurate and practically believable scenes led them
to create complete, evocative visual images that rely not only on description
in a text, but also on logical and imaginative extensions of texts, and
sometimes on powerful reinventions of the images within a text.
Pre-Raphaelitism in painting sdopted two forms, on of them was the ‘hard.edge
symbolic naturalism’, in 1849; and the other one was teh moody, erotic medievalism,
in1850s, during the Aesthetic Pre-Raphaelitism. This last one is the one that
had more relevance to poetry.
Pre-Raphaelitism in poetry had
major influence upon the writers of the Decadence of the 1890s, such as Ernest Dowson,
Lionel Johnson, Michael Field, and Oscar Wilde,
as well as upon Gerard Manley Hopkins
and William Butler Yeats, both of whom were influenced by John Ruskin and
visual Pre-Raphaelitism. Pre-Raphaelitism in painting had two forms or stages,
first, the hard-edge symbolic naturalism
of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood that began in 1849 and, second, the moody,
erotic medievalism that took form in the later 1850s. Many critics imply that
only this second, or Aesthetic, Pre-Raphaelitism
has relevance to poetry. In fact, although the combination of realistic style
with elaborate symbolism that distinguishes the early movement appears in a few
poems, particularly in those by James Collinson and the Rossettis, this second
stage finally had the largest -- at least the most easily noticeable --
influence on literature.
As
Anthony Harrison points out in his study of Christina Rossetti, “the
Pre-Raphaelites predictably etherealized sensation, displacing it from logical
contexts and all normally expected physical relations with objects in the
external world. With the Pre-Raphaelites the sensory and even the sensual
become idealized, image becomes symbol, and physical experience is superseded
by mental states as we are thrust deeply into the self-contained emotional
worlds of their varied personae. Very seldom do we have even the implied
auditor of Browning's dramatic monologues to give us our bearings, to situate a
speaker's perceptions in the phenomenal world. In this respect Pre-Raphaelite
poems resemble many from the first two volumes of their much-admired Tennyson
(especially "Mariana," "The Lotos-Eaters," "The Palace of Art," and "Oenone"). However, unlike his Pre-Raphaelite emulators,
Tennyson, after In
Memoriam, for the most part rejected predominantly aesthetic
poetry”.
Robert Browning , whose work was enormously popular with them all and
a particular influence on Rossetti, who wrote out Pauline (1833) from the British
Museum copy. Like the paintings of the Brotherhood, Browning's poems
simultaneously extend the boundaries of subject and create a kind of abrasive
realism, and like the work of the young painters, his also employ elaborate
symbolism drawn from biblical types to carry the audience beyond the aesthetic
surface, to which he, like the painters, aggressively draws attention. One must
mention the Browningesque element in Pre-Raphaelite poetry because it appears
intermittently all the way up to Hopkins in self-consciously difficult
language, the dramatic monologue, and elaborate applications of biblical typology.
Aesthetic Pre-Raphaelitism, nonetheless, has most in
common with the poets of this group, all of whom draw upon the poetic continuum
that descends from Spenser through Keats and Tennyson -- upon the poetic line,
in other words, that emphasizes lush vowel sounds, sensuous description,
subjective psychological states, elaborate personification, and complex poetic
forms, such as the sestina, borrowed from Italian and Provençal love
poetry.
They were
particularly fascinated by Medieval culture,
believing it to possess a spiritual and
creative integrity lost in later eras. This emphasis on medieval culture was to
clash with the realism
promoted by the stress on independent observation of nature. In its early
stages the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood believed that the two interests were
consistent with one another, but in later years the movement divided in two
directions. The realist side was led by Hunt and Millais, while the medievalist
side was led by Rossetti and his followers, Edward Burne-Jones
and William Morris. This split was never
absolute, since both factions believed that art was essentially spiritual in
character, opposing their idealism to the materialist realism associated with Courbet and Impressionism.
Pre-Raphalite’s influence
The Pre-Raphaelites were very
important in art (including both, painting and literature), they influenced
upon British, American and European art. Pre-Raphaelitism in poetry had major
influence upon the writers of the Decadence of the 1890’s. Some of these
authors are: Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Michael Field, Oscar Wilde, and
Gerard Manley Hopkins and William Butter Yeats. Both, Hopkins and Yeats were
highly influenced by John Ruskin and visual Pre-Raphaelitism.
Artists who were influenced by
the Brotherhood include John Brett, Philip Calderon, Arthur Hughes,
Evelyn De Morgan and Frederic Sandys. Ford Madox Brown, who was associated with
them from the beginning, is often seen as most closely adopting the
Pre-Raphaelite principles.
After 1856, Rossetti
became an inspiration for the medievalising strand of the movement. His work
influenced his friend William Morris,
in whose firm Morris, Marshall,
Faulkner & Co. he became a partner, and with whose wife Jane he may have had an affair. Ford Madox
Brown and Edward Burne-Jones
also became partners in the firm. Through Morris's company the ideals of the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood influenced many interior designers and architects,
arousing interest in medieval designs, as
well as other crafts. This led directly to the Arts and Crafts
movement headed by William Morris. Holman Hunt was also involved
with this movement to reform design through the Della Robbia
Pottery company.
The movement influenced the work
of many later British artists well into the twentieth century. Rossetti later
came to be seen as a precursor of the wider European Symbolist
movement. In the late twentieth century the Brotherhood of
Ruralists based its aims on Pre-Raphaelitism, while the Stuckists have also have derived
inspiration from it.
The work of Pre-Raphaelite
artists has been influenced by painting, the paintings are essential to
understand the meaning of a Pre-Raphaelite poem, because the poetry of the
Pre-Raphaelite artists shares the characteristics of the painter’s art.
Symbolic Realism in Pre-Raphaelitism
Symbolism is the
applied use of symbols: iconic representations that carry particular
conventional meanings.
The term "symbolism" is
often limited to use in contrast to "representationalism";
defining the general directions of a linear spectrum
- where in all symbolic concepts can be viewed in relation, and where changes
in context may imply systemic changes to
individual and collective definitions of symbols. "Symbolism" may
refer to a way of choosing representative symbols in line with abstract rather
than literal properties, allowing for the broader
interpretation of a carried meaning
than more literal concept-representations allow. A religion can be described as a language of
concepts related to human spirituality.
Symbolism hence is an important aspect of most religions.
However, not all use it, but most do at some point in time.
Typology (or typological
symbolism) is a Christian form of biblical interpretation that proceeds on the
assumption that God placed anticipations of Christ in the laws, events, and
people of the Old Testament. Typology, which had enormous influence on medieval
Europe, seventeenth century England, and Victorian Britain, not only provided
literature and art with powerfully imaginative images but also influenced attitudes
towards reality and time as well.
There are some authors that
tried to represent their religious beliefs through their art using symbolic
realism. Some of these authors are Holman Hunt or John Ruskin, for
example.
Bibliography:
- The Victorian Web:
http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/prb/newman12.html
http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/prb/4.html
http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/prb/1.html
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/patmore/prb.html
http://www.victorianweb.org/religion/type/typo10.html
- Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Raphaelite_Brotherhood