#pre raphaelites

“The Oxford Movement intellectuals had little to say about pictorial art per se: their rhetorical efforts were reserved for the defence of the church and its services in toto as forming a kind of romantic Gesamtkunstwerk. If asked what a ‘Tractarian picture’ looked like, many in the 1850s would have pointed to the Pre-Raphaelites, indeed to pictures such as Gabriel [Rossetti]’s The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini!, both featuring Christina [Rossetti]. She herself admired the pictures of Simeon Solomon in which ritual, both Christian and Jewish, is celebrated for its aesthetic appeal. At the Royal Academy in 1864, Rossetti especially picked out Solomon’s A Deacon in which a soft young man performs an ambiguous liturgical ceremony. Unmanliness became a standard charge against the ritualists, but Solomon had no qualms about celebrating the male dressing-up that was one aspect of the Tractarian disturbance of gendered roles. Rossetti, who, it has been argued, found her own gender-based constraints liberated to some extent through her church life, was perhaps drawn to such images partly for this reason.”

A Silent Wood

I was talking to my dad last night about the Pre Raphaelites. He doesn't know much about them, though, so I was trying to explain the meaning behind the name.