Note 238 — Chapter XI

This term, which means simply Italian painters before Raphael, is generally applied to an artistic movement in the middle of the nineteenth century. The term was first used by a brotherhood of German artists who worked together in the convent of San Isodoro, in Rome, with the idea of restoring art to its mediæval purity and simplicity. The term now generally refers to a company of seven young men,--Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his brother William, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, James Collinson, Frederick George Stevens, and Thomas Woolner,--who formed the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood in England in 1848. Their official literary organ was called The Germ, in which much of the early work of Morris and Rossetti appeared. They took for their models the early Italian painters who, they declared, were "simple, sincere, and religious." Their purpose was to encourage simplicity and naturalness in art and literature; and one of their chief objects, in the face of doubt and materialism, was to express the "wonder, reverence, and awe" which characterizes mediæval art. In its return to the mysticism and symbolism of the mediæval age, this Pre-Raphaelitism suggests the contemporary Oxford or Tractarian movement in religion. (See footnote, p. 554).