The PreRaphaelites Echo and Narcissus 1903 by John

The Pre-Raphaelites 'Echo and Narcissus' 1903 by John William Waterhouse (1849 - 1917)

• The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in John Millais's parents' house in London in 1848. • At the initial meeting John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt were present. • A few months later other artists (poets, painters and critics) joined the group with the aim of resisting the conventions and the ugly noisy world of industrial England. • These artists glorified the values of a simple but more beautiful past. • They called themselves Pre-Raphaelites as they thought that since the Italian painter Raphael (1483 -1520) art had degenerated losing its ties with nature. • According to them, Raphael had painted religious pictures with incredible perfection in technique, but with almost cynical disregard for spiritual feeling.

• The essence of the Brotherhood was, therefore, opposition to technical skill without inspiration. • They aimed at “Truth to Nature”, i. e. representing nature in a realistic way. • This could be achieved through a minute description of detail in nature • they wanted to return to the abundant detail and intense colours of the early XV century Italian art. • They painted only serious - usually religious or romantic – subjects. • Their paintings were also rich in symbolism.

• The Brotherhood's early doctrines were expressed in four points: 1. To have genuine ideas to express; 2. To study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them (i. e. their ideas); 3. To sympathise with what was direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what was conventional and learned by rote; 4. And, most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues.

• • The Pre-Raphaelites worshipped beauty above everything not only in painting but also in poetry. For them beauty had a social function, because it improved society. Therefore, they paid great attention to the formal aspects of their poems and experimented in metres and rhymes. The result was a poetry which gave particular importance to details and was characterized by:

1. sensuousness, 2. images and sounds suggesting physical pleasure, 3. pictorial qualities, • Their poetry was also rich in symbols, • because, through it, they wanted to express a very profound spiritual reality and their themes, like in painting, were mainly: • medieval, • biblical, • mystical.

• In conclusion, the term “Pre-Raphaelite” became synonymous with a rejection of the external squalor caused by the Industrial Revolution. • In their search for beauty and sensuousness they anticipated the later aesthetic movement. • The Pre-Raphaelites published their doctrines in a magazine called “The Germ”.