L’opera della
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
• Walter Hamilton, The Aesthetic Movement in England,
1882.
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- * William Holman Hunt
- * Sir John Everett Millais
* Dante Gabriel Rossetti
F. G. Stephens
- * William Michael Rossetti
* James Collinson
- * Thomas Woolner
William Holman Hunt
(2 April 1827 – 7 September 1910)
John Everett Millais, (Southampton, 8
giugno 1829 – Londra, 13 agosto 1896)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
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(Londra, 12 maggio 1828 – Birchington, 10 aprile 1882
Thomas Woolner (Hadleigh, 17
dicembre 1825 – 7 ottobre 1892)
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Associates of the The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
* John Brett, 1830-1902
* Ford Madox Brown, 1821-1893
* Charles Collins
* Arthur Hughes
* John William Inchbold
* R. B. Martineau
* Christina Rossetti
* John Ruskin, 1819-1900
* William Bell Scott, 1811-90
* Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, 1834-1862
* Thomas Seddon
* John Lucas Tupper, sculptor, poet, art theorist, and member of the Pre-Raphaelite circle
* Henry Wallis
* Lady Pauline Trevelyan, Friend and Patron of the Pre-Raphaelites
• Discorso tenuto presso il Social Science Congress a
Manchester nel 1879 da Sir Coutts Lindsay, fondatore
della Grosvenor Gallery :
“Their creed involved the denial of everything the English
school had hitherto held sacred. They accepted Nature
alone to be their future guide and Bible, and in it they
beheld the condemnation of all art except the earliest
art of Italy…. These men threw themselves
passionately into the study of the natural, and had
implicit faith in the all-teaching of Nature without
assistance from the stores of past knowledge. “
William Michael Rossetti, D.G.Rossetti, His Family
Letters, 1895:
• To have genuine ideas to express;
• To study nature attentively, so as to know how to
express them;
• To sympathize with what is direct and serious and
heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what
is conventional and self-parading and learned by
rote;
• And most indispensable of all, to produce
thoroughly good pictures and statues.
W. M. Rossetti in Pre-Raphaelite Writing, edited by D. Stanford,
1973.
• They hated the lack of ideas in art, and the lack of character; the
silliness and vacuity which belong to the one, the flimsiness and
make-believe which result from the other. They hated those forms
of execution which are merely smooth and prettyish, and those
which, pretending to mastery, are nothing better than slovenly and
slapdash, or what the P.R.B.'s called "sloshy." Still more did they
hate the notion that each artist should obey his own individual
impulse, act upon his own perception and study of Nature,(… ); but
that, instead of all this, he should try to be "like somebody else,"
imitating some extant style and manner, and applying the cut-anddry rules enunciated by A from the practice of B or C. They
determined to do the exact contrary. The temper of these striplings,
after some years of the current academic training, was the temper
of rebels: they meant revolt, and produced revolution.
William Holman Hunt, The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 1905
Pre-Raphaelitism is not Pre-Raphaelism. Raphael
in his prime was an artist of the most
independent and daring course as to convention.
(…) What had cost Perugino, Fra Bartolomeo,
Leonardo da Vinci, and Michael Angelo more
years to develop than Raphael lived, he seized in
a day—nay, in one single inspection of his
precursors' achievements. His rapacity was
atoned for by his never-stinted acknowledgments
of his indebtedness, and by the reverent and
philosophical use in his work of the prizes that he
seized. (…)
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What he gained (…) was the power to prove that the human figure is of nobler proportion,
and has grander capabilities of action than is seen by the casual eye, and that for large work,
expression must mainly depend upon movement of the body. (…) There is no need here to
trace any failure in Raphael's career; but the prodigality of his productiveness, and his
training of many assistants, compelled him to lay down rules and manners of work; and his
followers, even before they were left alone, accentuated his poses into postures.
They caricatured the turns of his heads and the lines of his limbs, designed their figures in
patterns; and they built up their groups into formal pyramids. The master himself, at the last,
in the “Transfiguration,” was not exempt from such deadly artificialities and conventions. The
artists who thus servilely travestied the failings of this prince of painters were Raphaelites,
and although certain rare geniuses since then have dared to burst the fetters forged in
Raphael's decline, I now repeat, what we said in the days of our youth, that the traditions
that went on through the Bolognese Academy (which were introduced at the foundation of
all later Schools and enforced by Le Brun, Du Fresnoy, Raphael Mengs, and Sir Joshua
Reynolds, to our own time) were lethal in their influence, tending to stifle the breath of
design. The name Pre-Raphaelite excludes the influence of such corrupters of perfection,
even though Raphael, by reason of certain of his works, be in the list, while it accepts that of
his more sincere forerunners.
• “ It is simply fuller Nature we want.
Revivalism, whether it is of classicism or
medievalism, is seeking after dry bones�”.
Da un colloquio tra Hunt e Rossetti
Raymond Watkinson, Pre-Raphaelite Art and
Design, 1970.
“That choiche of colours, blue-green, purples,
violet, (…) came to be one of the marks of much
Preraphaelite painting; colour which, however
naturalistically rendered, was selective, aimed at
producing certain emotional effects”.
Poetry of particulars
Pleinairism
William Morris (24 March 1834 – 3
October 1896)
Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet (28 August
1833 – 17 June 1898)
Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris 1874
Benjamin Woodward
The Oxford Union Debating Hall
http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~bump/oxford/union/Oxfordunion.html
Sir Palomydes' Jealousy of Sir Tristam
Opere letterarie di William Morris
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La difesa di Ginevra ed altre opere (The Defence of Guinevere and other Poems), 1858;
La vita e la morte di Giasone (The Life and Death of Jason), 1867;
Il paradiso terrestre (The Earthly Paradise), 1868–1870;
L'amore è abbastanza (Love is Enough, or The Freeing of Pharamond) 1872;
La caduta dei nibelunghi (The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Nibelungs) 1876;
Speranze e timori per l'arte (Hopes and Fears For Art) 1882;
Un sogno di John Ball (A Dream of John Ball) 1886;
The House of the Wolfings, 1888;
Le radici delle montagne (The Roots of the Mountains), 1889;
Notizie da nessun dove (News from Nowhere), 1890;
The Story of the Glittering Plain, 1890;
La fonte ai confini del mondo (The Well at the World's End), 1892;
Il bosco oltre il mondo (The Wood Beyond the World), 1895;
Le acque delle meravigliose isole (The Water of the Wondrous Isles) 1896;
The Sundering Flood, 1898.
Alcune poesie di D. G. Rossetti
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Poetry
"The Blessed Damozel"
"The Burden of Nineveh“
"For an Annunciation, Early German"
"For a Venetian Pastoral"
"The Girlhood of Mary Virgin" (1849)
The House of Life
The Four Willowwood Sonnets
"Jenny"
"The Last Confession“
"My Sister's Sleep"
"The Passover in the Holy Family" (1856)
"The Portrait" , "Sea-Limits" "Staff and Scrip" , "Troy Town" ,"The
Woodspurge"
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Published Volumes
Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862)
The Prince's Progress (1866)
Commonplace and Other Stories (1870)
Sing-Song. A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872)
A Pageant and Other Poems (1881)
New Poems (1896)
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Swinburne
Ruskin
Pater
Wilde
Symons
J. D. Merritt, The Pre-Raphaelite Poetry, Londra, 1966.
• “There are certain characteristcs which may be seen as
typical of all (or almost all) Pre-Raphaelite poetry: 1) A
heavy use of descriptive detail; 2) Images that tend to be
highly sensuous and full of colour; 3) The occasional use of
an obscure symbolism, such as repeated use of the number
seven, and references to the more mysterious aspects of
Christianity or of 'pagan' religion; 4) A tendency to lend the
tone (if not the form) of a ballad to the narrative; 5) The
frequent use of subjects that have an innate poignancy or
morbidity. Many of these subjects were taken from literary
sources; 6) Deliberate 'medievalism', such as the use of
medieval sounding words, or the use of settings that,
though unidentified, seem Pre-Reinaissance. "