The Italian Job: Exploring Italy’s influence on the Pre-Raphaelites

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The Pre-Raphaelites and Italy

By Colin Harrison and Christopher Newall

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was riddled with contradiction. Although they declared themselves a secret society, they published a monthly journal and found a mouthpiece in John Ruskin, the century’s most voluminous writer.  Among their contradictions was their championing of pre-Renaissance Italian art, as many of the Brotherhood’s members never even saw any at firsthand.  Nevertheless, the Brotherhood produced an impressive body of work that directly referenced Italian literature, art, architecture, and landscape.  The Pre-Raphaelites and Italy accompanied the Ashmolean Museum’s exhibition of the same name in 2010and intimately explores the salient Italian influence on the short-lived, often idiosyncratic, Brotherhood.     

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (or the PRB, as its members called it) consisted of seven young artists of the British Royal Academy who, in 1848, rebelled against academic art, which they thought had become sterilized by slavish imitation of the Renaissance masters.  They chose their deliberately divisive name principally for its shock value; in his lectures, Sir Joshua Reynolds, president of the Academy, lavishly fawned upon the works of Raphael.  In contrast, the Brotherhood considered Raphael’s imitators to be ‘purveyors of slosh’.  They briefly published a monthly periodical which called for a turning away from Renaissance idealism and, largely under John Ruskin’s influence, advocated a ‘return to nature’.

Though never a member of the Brotherhood himself, John Ruskin in effect served as its chief patron and chief whip.  His influence is the thread that unites the stylistically diverse Brotherhood, and his name is ubiquitous throughout the catalogue in the context of commissioning, inspiring, or owning nearly every painting.  Ruskin’s own works fill an entire chapter of the catalogue, as do those of his ‘disciples’, as the book calls his followers, for indeed they adhered to him with an almost religious devotion. 

At Ruskin’s advice, the Brotherhood manically painted works of pre-Renaissance Italian architecture, which they admired for its asymmetry and seemingly organic character.  While in Italy, Ruskin found much of its old architecture to be in an alarming state of disrepair (‘The rate at which Venice is going is about that of a lump of sugar in hot tea’,  he famously observed in 1846), and he urged the Brotherhood to faithfully copy Italy’s gothic edifices for the sake of posterity.  This they did, resulting in a robust collection of exquisite plein air architectural sketches and paintings, largely createdin Florence and Venice.  The PRB ideal of ‘truth to nature’ was well suited to this documentary intent.     

In addition to pre-Renaissance architecture, the Brotherhood also copiously referenced mediaeval Italian literature.  By far, Dante was their favorite source, principally for his amorous Vita Nova.  PRB artist Gabriel Rossetti even changed his first name to Dante as an homage to the poet.  The literary paintings of the PRB were dream-like and melancholic, almost always emphasizing themes such as unrequited love and tragedy.   Naturally, paintings of Dante and Beatrice were common.

Like any youth rebellion, the Brotherhood artists were more vocal about what they opposed than about what they proposed.  Consequently, their output was eclectic.  Ruskin’s watercolor study of the baptistery of Florence Cathedral is a tour de force in which he faithfully replicates the surface detail of its cracked marble cladding with astonishing accuracy.  Similarly, Frank Randal’s paintings of Ravenna’s San Vitale mosaics are so detailed that one can literally count each individual piece of stone tesserae within each mosaic.  Other PRB paintings dare to flirt with abstraction.  Frederic Leighton’s painting of Italy’s Monte Croce possesses none of the descriptive detail of the earlier Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and the hasty execution of Giovanni Costa’s Porto d’Anzio is stylistically akin to American Impressionism.  Sir Joseph Paton’s dreamlike Dante Meditating the Episode of Francesca da Rimini and Paulo Malatesta even anticipates 20th-century surrealism.  One of this show’s merits was its encompassing of the full idiosyncratic range of the Brotherhood’s output.         

In their day, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood met with mixed critical reception.  They were mercilessly ridiculed by Du Maurier in Punch magazineand by Gilbert and Sullivan in their operetta Patience.  But the movement was no failure.  Indeed, the PRB’s paintings were purchased by such luminaries as Ruskin, Gladstone, Prince Albert and Queen Victoria.  Though never a cohesive movement, the Brotherhood nevertheless produced an exceptional output of imperishable art, and The Pre-Raphaelites in Italy is an accessible, beautifully illustrated tribute to the Brotherhood and the Italian inspired works that, principally though John Ruskin, eventually found their way into Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. 

The Pre-Raphaelites and Italy  by Colin Harrison and Christopher Newall is published by Lund Humphries, 2010. 217 pp.,  194 colour illus. ISBN: 978 1 84822 0751