THE PRE-RAPHAELITISM

According to the new problems of the society, emerged a new artistic movement called “The pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood”.

This artistic movement emerged in England in the middle of 19^th century, and it was founded by Millais, Hunt and Rossetti. Their objectives were to fight against the academicism, the problems and bad consequences of the industrial society and the conventionalism of the Victorian era. They tried to create a more spontaneous art, looking for the inspiration in the nature and in the old great teachers, prior to Raphael.

Their favourite thematic varied between the bourgeois intimism, modern life matters, literature episodes and religious scenes.

They tried to look for the purity of the sentiments. Their poetry was between the modernism and symbolism.

Historically speaking, pre-Raphaelitism is a late flowering of the major Romantic Movement, induced by the new excitement about visual art for which Ruskin was responsible.

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.

The second form of Pre-Raphaelitism, which grows out of the first under the direction of D.G. Rossetti, is Aesthetic Pre-Raphaelitism, and it in turn produced the Arts and Crafts Movement, modern functional design, and the Aesthetes and Decadents. Rossetti and his follower Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898) emphasized themes of eroticized medievalism (or medievalized eroticism) and pictorial techniques that produced moody atmosphere. This form of Pre-Raphaelitism has most relevance to poetry; for although the earlier combination of a realistic style with elaborate symbolism appears in a few poems, particularly those of the Rossettis, this second stage finally had the most influence upon literature. All the poets associated with Pre-Raphaelitism draw upon the poetic continuum that descends from Spenser through Keats and Tennyson — one that emphasizes lush vowel sounds, sensuous description, and subjective psychological states.

Pre-Raphaelitism in poetry had major influence upon the writers of the Decadence as well as upon Gerard Manley Hopkins and W.B. Yeats, both of whom were also influenced by Ruskin and visual Pre-Raphaelitism.

The Pre-Raphaelite ‘stunner’, the idealized woman, with her thick neck, long jaws and masculine features, popularised by founding member Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was the beginning of a slippery slope which started at male privileging gender polarity and ended at replete androgyny as seen in Beardsley’s illustrations of the 1890’s. But gender was only one limb of the Pre-Raphaelite body, one facet of the Pre-Raphaelite experience. It entailed an entirely new manner of representing human anatomy and began with an overarching ethic of imbuing art with meaning by embodying in it medieval and spiritual ideals.

In practice, the more obvious revolutionary qualities of the Brotherhood were a more natural way of painting, greater attention to detail, and naturalistic lighting.