One of my very favorite artistic movements is that of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The Brotherhood was founded by William Holman Hunt , John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1848. These three were later joined by William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens and Thomas Woolner. Their collective intention was to return to a worship of detail and complexity within their compositions. These seven rebels found themselves extremely disillusioned with the direction that art was taking. They wanted to return to the art of late medieval and early Renaissance Europe, an art vastly different from the work put forth by their contemporaries. The subject matter of the work of the Pre-Raphaelites is mostly that of a noble, religious, or moralizing nature. The Brotherhood published a periodical called ‘The Germ,’ which explained their doctrine, mainly…
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
(Read the rest of the article and see some samples of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood…HERE)
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