Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was an English movement founded in 1848 by the painters Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, soon joined by poets and writers sharing their aims, most notably Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel's sister, and William Morris. Rejecting what they saw as the artificial, academic conventions descended from Raphael and the High Renaissance, the group sought a return to the vivid detail, symbolic intensity and moral seriousness they associated with art before Raphael, translating these aims in literature into richly sensuous, medievalizing, symbol-laden verse. Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poetry and his sister's devotional and narrative verse, alongside William Morris's romances and later utopian fiction, carried the movement's aesthetic into literature proper, and its emphasis on beauty, medieval imagery and symbolic richness fed directly into the later Aestheticism and Symbolism of the fin de siecle.