tti, John Everett Millais, and William
Holman Hunt. The name expresses their admiration of the early
Italian--and notably the early Florentine--religious painters, like
Giotto, Ghiberti, Bellini, and Fra Angelica. In the work of these men
they found a sweetness, depth, and sincerity of devotional feeling, a
self-forgetfulness and humble adherence to truth, which were absent from
the sophisticated art of Raphael and his successors. Even the imperfect
command of technique in these "primitives" had a charm. The stiffness
and awkwardness of their figure painting, their defects of drawing,
perspective, and light and shade, their lack of anatomical science were
like the lispings of childhood or the artlessness of an old ballad. The
immediate occasion of the founding of the Brotherhood was a book of
engravings which Hunt and Rossetti saw at Millais' house, from the
frescoes by Gozzoli, Orcagna, and others in the Campo Santo, at Pisa; the
same frescoes, it will be remembered, which so strongly impressed Leigh
Hunt and Keats. Holman Hunt--though apparently not his associates--had
also read with eager approval the first volume of Ruskin's "Modern
Painters," in which the young artists of England are advised to "go to
nature in all singleness of heart . . . rejecting nothing, selecting
nothing." Pre-Raphaelitism was a practical, as "Modern Painters" was a
theoretical, protest against the academic traditions which kept young
artists making school copies of Raphael, instructed them that a third of
the canvas should be occupied with a principal shadow, and that no two
people's heads in the picture should be turned the same way, and asked,
"Where are you going to put your brown tree?"

The three original members of the group associated with themselves four
others: Thomas Woolner, the sculptor; James Collinson, a painter; F. G.
Stephens, who began as an artist and ended as an art critic; and
Rossetti's brother William, who was the literary man of the movement.
Woolner was likewise a poet, and contributed to _The Germ_[2] his two
striking pieces, "My Beautiful Lady" and "Of My Lady in Death." Among
other artists not formally enrolled in the Brotherhood, but who worked
more or less in the spirit and principles of Pre-Raphaelitism, were Ford
Madox Brown, an older man, in whose studio Rossetti had, at his own
request, been admitted as a student; Walter Deverell, who took
Collinson's place when the latter resigned his membership in or