PRE-RAPHAELITES. A term which. prop erly signifying the Italian painter's before Ra phael, is now commonly applied to their imitators in the nineteenth century. It was first used in this sense of a group of young German artists who, after their expulsion from the Vienna Acad emy in I SIO, established themselves in the de serted Franciscan convent of San Isidoro at Rome. They formed an art brotherhood which was to live in seclusion and sanctity, and were nicknamed "The German Lay Brothers," and aft erwards "The Nazarenes." Their object was the restoration of Christian art to its medifrval purity. and they fink as their guides the Pre Raphaelite masters. They regarded the mental conception as the chief feature of a work of art, and form as the chief vehicle of its expression, color being subsidiary. The leader and moving spirit of the school was overbeek (q.v.) other members were Cornelius, the brothers Sehadow, Philip Veit, Sehnorr von Carolsfeld, Fiihrich, and Steinle. They afterwards scattered throughout Germany. some, like Cornelius, relinquishing their tenets, but Overbeek remained at Rome, faithful to the end. Their art is characterized by a certain nalvetil, and is technically very primitive.
The name is much more widely applied to the school which arose in England about the middle of the nineteenth century, and accomplished great results both in art and literature. The movement originated with a band of seven young men— Da nte Gabriel Rossetti and his brother William Michael, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, Frederick George Stephens, James Col linson, and Thomas \Voolner the sculptor. The Brotherhood was formed in the autumn of 1848, and its work really began with "The Eve of Saint Agnes," a picture by 'Holman Hunt. who was the first of them to realize the purity of work in the early Italian painters and to seek to rival their sincerity, though they owed much to the influ ence of an older man. Ford Madox Brown. For a time in 1850 they published a periodical called The Germ, in which some of Rossetti's earliest poetical work and his fine prose study "Hand and Soul" first appeared. Like the German school, they were convinced that modern traditions had led painters away from the only true principle and the only worthy practice of their art, and that it was necessary to go back for inspiration to the work of the time when art had not ceased to be simple, sincere, and religions. Both in
literature and in art, they wished to revert (in Mr. \Vatts-Dunton's phrase) from "the temper of imitation, prosaic acceptance, pseudo-classi cism, and domestic materialism" to that of "won der, reverence, and awe." Their official manifesto in The Germ declares their intention "to encour age and enforce an entire adherence to the sim plicity of nature, either in art or poetry." They were defended and warmly praised by Ruskin, who found in their art the modern incarnation of his theories; but by others they were held to have recurred "to a style of painting unadapted to our age, to an ignorance of technical knowledge, and to a religious feeling that could not be vol untarily recalled in a period of different ten dencies." A closer adherence to form followed in the work that felt the influence of the movement. In seeking truth of detail the ensemble was often lost religious and mystic tendencies occasionally degenerated into affectation which presented an easy mark for caricature. Millais began to break away from the Brotherhood between 1S55 and 1857, hut Hunt remained faithful, and Burne-Jones's work throughout showed a strong sympathy with the school. In his later life Rossetti threw off the trammels of the narrower Pre-Raphaelitism, while adhering to the mystical attitude. In poetry, the movement may really be considered as a recurrent phase of the wider Ro mantic movement, whose teaching had been some what obscured in the half-century since its proclamation in England. In its looking hack to the Middle Ages, it harmonized with the Oxford Movement of its own day, and with the Gothic revival of Pugin. Its mental attitude is magnifi cently represented in the highly colored, imagina tive 'painter's poetry' of Rossetti and in much of the work of William Morris and some of Swill hurtle's.
Consult: Destree, Les Preraphaelites (Brus sels. 1894) ; Janson, "Deutsche Priiraphaeliten," in Zeitschrift fur bildende Kunst (Leipzig, 1901) ; Wood, Dante Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement (New York. 1894) Bate, The English Pre-Raphaelite Painters, Their Associates and Successors (London, 1899) ; W. M. Rossetti (ed.), Pre-Raphaelite Diaries and Letters (ib., 1900); Dolman Hunt, "The Pre-Raphaelite Brother hood." in Contemporary Review (ib.. ISS6) ; Noble, "A Pre-Raphaelite Magazine," in The Son net in England (ib., 1896) ; and see ROSSETTI, DANTE GABRIEL; ROMANTICISM.