Raphael may be more than ever a name that sets collectors and the art market aquiver, but to a group of British painters who worked a century ago, his work and life span (1483-1520) marked the point where art went wrong. They longed for the "faithfulness" to nature of the Italians who preceded him, and joined together in a Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
This bit of bravado did not seriously damage Raphael's reputation, and the Pre-Raphaelites themselves grew to seem the epitome of Victorianism, sweet as treacle and finicky as a lace antimacassar. Too pretty, too pious and too much concerned with the past, read the 20th century's indictment. Pre-Raphaelite prices sank so low that in 1955, one work, Ford Madox
Brown's Sardanapalus and Myrrha (opposite) sold for virtually the cost of its frame: $70.
Now, a major revival of this minor romantic art cult is under way. Collectors are dusting off what they thought were slips in their purchasing judgment. Prices are beginning to hit $10,000. And Indianapolis' Herron Museum this week opens a thorough review of the movement whose name clearly states its yearning to turn 400 years back to the quattrocento.
Immortal Inspirers. Actually, the Pre-Raphaelites did not see themselves as holding back the clock. They were rather a band of rebels in a century abristle with dissent. Three young Englishmen founded the movement in 1848, a year of social revolution throughout Europe, eleven years after Constable's death: William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, none over 21 years old.
They organized a brotherhood to do battle with the sham idealism of the Royal Academy's classical "Grand Manner." They wanted to copy nature rather than slicken the surface of the world as they believed artists had done since the High Renaissance. They also hoped to avoid the cheapening effect that the Industrial Revolution was having on honest hand craftsmanship.
To give themselves historic tutors, the brethren drew up a list of 57 "immortals" whose ideals resembled their own. Among them were Jesus Christ, Joan of Arc, Opera Composer Giovanni Bellini, and Coventry Patmore, a minor romantic poet. These models supplied them with literary and moral inspiration. The brotherhood even published a little magazine, The Germ, in 1850 "to encourage and enforce an entire adherence to the simplicity of nature."
T.L.C. for Every Blade. From where the Pre-Raphaelites sat, honest-to-God artisanship seemed to have ceased with the end of the Middle Ages when painter and stonemason worked side by side. During the Renaissance, they thought, art had bogged down in formulas, divorced from the community of man, and had become the terrain of academicians for whom Raphael was the exemplar. True sentiment, whether religious or secular, had vanished from art in the eyes of the Pre-Raphaelites, so they turned to a literary, historic past that supplied them with heartfelt admiration for purity and chivalry. Established themes from Shakespeare, the Bible and the Arthurian legends furnished ready references. In oils, the brotherhood tried to evoke the natural piety that a verse of St. Mark's, a pentameter of Dante's, or a quatrain of Keats's inspired. In short, they were sick of portrait puffery.