Volume 24, Number 21 & 22 · January 26, 1978
Cosa Nostra
By Geoffrey Grigson
Four Rossettis: A Victorian Biography
by Stanley Weintraub
Weybright and Talley, 303 pp., $15.00
Pre-Raphaelitism, as a principle, was precociously brooded in 1847, by Holman Hunt, aged twenty, and John Millais, aged eighteen, with some not entirely convinced help from Dante Gabriel Rossetti, aged nineteen. Then a year later the Pre-Raphaelite group or movement was hatched. Hunt says that he and Millais, his pupil, were resolved 'to turn more and more devotedly to Nature as the one means of purifying modern art.' They found an inadequacy of nature in Raphael, or at any rate too little of the truth of nature in the subsequent strains of art by those who blindly insisted on the supremacy of Raphael. Hunt was also to write that he and Millais used to stand in front of the Raphael cartoons (then at Hampton Court) and judge them fearlessly, also that they condemned Raphael's Transfiguration (which they had never seen) 'for its grandiose disregard of the simplicity of truth, the pompous posturing of the Apostles, and the unspiritual attitudinising of the Saviour.'
Review, 2415 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |