Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s romantic mysteries

There is something deeply mysterious about art, which is no doubt why it is surrounded by so many myths.

The princess out of school (c. 1901) by Edward Hughes. From Medieval Moderns: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. On show at the National Gallery of Victoria.

There is something deeply mysterious about art, especially about the best art, which is no doubt why it is surrounded by so many myths, including the ancient and persistent idea that artists are a bit mad, and the more recent cliche that most artists are unrecognised in their lifetime and fully appreciated only posthumously. In reality, even a cursory knowledge of art history shows that talent generally has been recognised and rewarded. The process became less regular and predictable during the century or so from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th, when a succession of avant-garde styles disconcerted the public and took a little longer to achieve recognition and financial rewards. During the past half-century or so, the public and especially institutions, anxious not to be the last to understand a new style, have found it safer to embrace everything.

Nonetheless, the appreciation of styles and movements comes and goes in waves, often correlated with contemporary styles and sensibility. Among the most interesting examples of this phenomenon are the way that 16th-century mannerism was rediscovered in the age of expressionism, and that a new appreciation of archaic sculpture coincided with the modernist interests in direct carving and simplified, abstracted form.

One of the most important cases of revaluation in art history concerns the early Renaissance. In the historiography of the 16th century, as best articulated by Giorgio Vasari in his monumental collection of artist biographies, the Vite (1550), ancient civilisation had almost collapsed after the fall of Rome and had been progressively restored from the time of Giotto onwards. The restoration was completed in what we call the High Renaissance, with the work of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael. Modern civilisation had at last broadly reached parity with the standard achieved a millennium earlier and could aspire to further progress.

Vasari’s periodisation remains the basis for our study of the Renaissance, but the emphasis on restoration and the sense that Leonardo and his successors had finished the job meant that the 14th and 15th centuries were consigned to the status of forerunners, pioneers whose work, though admirable in itself, remained somewhat crude and incomplete. The result was that from the 16th to the 18th centuries, the corpus of modern painting began with the High Renaissance. This is why the great museums of Europe that have grown from princely collections formed during that time, such as the Alte Pinakothek in Munich or the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, are rich in the works of Raphael, Titian and Rubens but tend to have few if any pictures from the early Renaissance.

A new appreciation of the so-called Italian primitives arose in England in the 19th century, and this is how the National Gallery acquired such an extraordinary collection of 14th and 15th-century pictures. Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), Walter Pater’s The Renaissance (1873) and John Ruskin’s Mornings in Florence (1875-77) all helped a wider public to understand this rediscovered art. Ruskin popularised Giotto and Pater’s book almost single-handedly established the cults of Botticelli, Giorgione and of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.

The new taste for the early Renaissance was almost inevitably accompanied by a relative depreciation of the High Renaissance and baroque as models for contemporary practice, and the Pre-Raphaelite movement in England was a group of artists who, as their name implies, sought inspiration in the styles that preceded the High Renaissance synthesis. What this meant in practice was the elimination of stylistic devices associated with Leonardo and his followers: one was the softening of contours known as sfumato, which allows forms to flow more organically into each other; the other was chiaroscuro, the use of strong lights and darks to enhance the modelling of figures as well as to dramatise effect of space and to unify the composition pictorially.

The Pre-Raphaelites, as we can see in the exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, deliberately set about stripping these features, which had become standard parts of the academic curriculum, from their practice of painting. Contours are no longer soft but as hard and linear as any in the Quattro­cento; chiaroscuro is banished so that the whole composition is equally illuminated.

At the same time, they believed in minute ­realism in the depiction of figures and interior or natural settings, and this, in combination with the hard outlines and the universal lighting, lends their paintings a hyper-real, even at times surreal quality, exemplified here by numerous works but most spectacularly by William Holman Hunt’s The Shadow of Death (1873). This famous image, which the artist painted while in the Holy Land — then still part of the Ottoman Empire — shows Jesus in his ­father’s carpentry workshop, but raising his arms and looking upwards with an expression of ecstasy, as though he had just heard the call to begin his mission to the world. As he does so, he unwittingly casts on the wall behind a shadow that anticipates his crucifixion. The original painting made a huge impression on its contemporaries. It was sold for the enormous sum of 10,000 guineas, which included the copyright that allowed its purchaser to profit from the production of thousands of prints, one of which is the work exhibited here (1878): sales of the reproductions amounted to almost twice the sale price of the original.

The case says a great deal about the intertwining of piety and commerce in the Victorian period, but the image itself has still more to teach us. In the first place we can see how the Pre-Raphaelite taste for minute realism is profoundly attuned to the literal-mindedness of the 19th century. The floor is covered with a quantity of wood shavings that no Renaissance artist would ever have dreamed of painting. One can’t help thinking of Oscar Wilde’s question on looking at WP Frith’s huge painting Derby Day (1858): “Is it all done by hand?” Religious faith had clearly become fragile in the age of Darwin, and viewers were insatiable for precise and tangible evidence of the reality of the sacred stories.

But there is another strange thing about this picture: the figure of Jesus is oddly effeminate — an effect exaggerated in the print — both in the facial features and expression and in the posture of the legs, which is meant to recall their crossing in the crucifixion. There is some precedent for a degree of feminisation in earlier art, arising from the search for a more refined and spiritual physiognomy; here, however, the effect is almost shocking to our eyes.

It was, however, presumably invisible to the people who bought the prints and saw in them the expression of a sublime piety. Such disparities between the sensibilities of past and present are always significant, and once again reflect the rather obtuse positivism of the 19th century. An earlier artist such as Masaccio could imagine a Christ who was refined yet masculine; in the age of scientific progress and increasing materialism, it seems that the only way to make features less coarse was to make them feminine.

This in turn leads us to the most curious aspect of the exhibition as a whole, which is its domination by images of women. It is another incongruity: in this century of patriarchal men with long Old Testament beards, ideas of love, spiritual aspiration and even anxiety or dread are inevitably embodied by female figures.

From a princess lying on a lawn surrounded by flowers, to Jane Shore cowering under a bridge before her capture, or Rosamund surprised in her secret garden, the ubiquity of women recalls Jung’s theory of the animus and its anima. Often vulnerable and suffering, but sometimes menacing and embodying sexual passion or the vertiginous attraction of death, these women seem to stand for a secret inner sensibility hidden behind the facade of Victorian virility. Another interesting thing about these female subjects is that while some come from scriptural or mythological sources, the most conspicuous ones belong to the Middle Ages or from the early and quasi-mythical age of Arthurian Britain. The Mediterranean and Near Eastern roots of Western civilisation are not forgotten but Nordic and Anglo-Celtic themes exert for a time a fascination that was to fade rapidly in the 20th century. The origins of this interest in late antique and early medieval northern history go back to the end of the 18th century and the beginnings of the romantic period. After the Enlightenment’s insistence on universal rational values and universal human rights, the romantics emphasised the local traditions and customs of different peoples, thus inventing the idea of culture in this anthropological sense.

Culture has been an important anthropological concept, but as a historical idea it entered into a dangerous amalgam with revolutionary politics to produce the nationalism of the 19th century. Nationalism in turn helped drive the unifications of Italy and Germany; it fuelled aggressive rivalry between nation-states, the fascism of the 20th century, and a lot of ethnic violence and destructive ideology concerning cultural identity up to our own time.

As romanticism was a northern movement, originating in Britain and Germany before spreading to France, then to Italy, and as it was concerned with local traditions, it naturally took an interest in the ancient Nordic heritage of the Celtic and Germanic peoples. And because romanticism also turned from reason to an absorption in feeling, imagination, dreams and even nightmares, the movement rediscovered a medi­eval world that had been dismissed by previous centuries as crude, ignorant and superstitious.

Thus the romantics had already fallen in love with early northern subjects, and their longing for a Nordic equivalent of Homer had even made them believe in the fictitious ancient bard Ossian. What is new with the Pre-Raphaelites, whose work belongs especially to the third quarter of the 19th century, is that they developed a quasi-medieval pictorial style — strongly coloured by contemporary realism — to match their subjects of knights and ladies, love and melancholy.

As if the corpus of Arthurian and other chivalric legends were not extensive enough, auth­ors from Tennyson to William Morris composed volumes of neo-medieval verse and prose, which were evidently popular at the time but have not found many readers in the past century. Perhaps the best of them will be rediscovered one day in another cyclical change of taste.

At any rate, many of these works exist in particularly fine editions, for Morris’s Kelmscott Press published them in the beautiful handmade volumes that form one of the most interesting parts of the exhibition. Most impressive of all is the magnificent edition of Chaucer, the great 14th-century author whose rediscovery was an enduring achievement of romantic and Victorian medievalism.

Medieval Moderns: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, until July 12.