The Book of Art for Young PeopleConway, Agnes Ethel
General
The Book of Art for Young People
Conway, Agnes Ethel
Art -- Juvenile literature; Painting
A great love of the Old Masters inspired the work of a group of young
artists, who, about the year 1850, banded themselves together into
a society which they called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The title
indicates their aim, which was to draw the inspiration of their art
from the fifteenth-century painters of Italy. The sweetness of feeling
in a picture such as Botticelli's 'Nativity,' the delicacy of
workmanship and beautiful painting of detail in Antonello's 'St.
Jerome' and other pictures of that date, had an irresistible
fascination for them. They fancied and felt that these artists had
attained to the highest of which art was capable, so that the best
could only again be produced by a faithful study of their methods.
The aims of the Brotherhood were not imitation of the artists but of
the methods of the past. They held that every painted object, and every
painted figure should be as true as it could be made to the object
as it actually existed, rather than to the effect produced upon the
eye, seeing it in conjunction with other objects.
These men heralded a widespread medieval revival, but all the study
in the world could not make them paint like born artists of the
fifteenth century. Yet there are those who think that much of the spirit
of beauty, which had dwelt in the soul of Botticelli and his
contemporaries, was born again in Rossetti and Burne-Jones. Their
feeling for beauty of form and purity of colour, and their aloofness
from the modern world, impart to their work an atmosphere that may
remind us of the fifteenth century, though the fifteenth century could
never have produced it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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