Raphael Rejected

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.

Happy slaves to nature, the Pre-Raphaelites painted every blade of grass with tender loving care. Such devotion led to compulsive extremes. In Hunt's passion for accuracy, he traveled several times to Palestine to catch its religious fever for scenes from the life of Christ. Millais, who painted his Ophelia afloat, made the model for it lie in a bathtub for lifelike dampness, while he painstakingly added the greenery leaf by leaf. Ford Madox Brown, sometime teacher of Rossetti, took 13 years to finish one oil. The whole output of the Pre-Raphaelites is relatively small.

Illuminated Damsels. Turning away from the neutral beige ground then commonly used, the Pre-Raphaelites prepared their canvas with white lead and varnish, painting while it was still wet. The result was brighter colors than were thought tasteful in the mid-19th century. Their hidden brushstrokes built up surface details more like medieval illuminations than bravura oils. Their posing was selfconscious, but they believed it appropriate. Rossetti, a better poet than painter, described his damsels' turrety necks as "round, reared necks, meet columns of Love's shrine."

From the start, the Pre-Raphaelites were a volatile, youthful lot. It was hardly unexpected that their brotherhood broke up less than 15 years after they formed it. Only William Holman Hunt was bitter about the brotherhood's end. Millais brushed it off as a youthful fancy, eventually became president of the Royal Academy, earned -L-30,000 a year and a baronetcy for his fashionable portraiture. Burne-Jones also got a title, doing Tennysonian tapestries of never-never land subjects in colors that inspired the Gilbert and Sullivan phrase "greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery." Brown gave up the dreamy past to picture the working classes as the center of England's new society. And Rossetti, who became a drug addict after his model-wife died, abandoned fidelity to nature for a mystical symbolism.

At the Wall. The Pre-Raphaelites did sense one vital problem: the separation of the artist from society. They sought to reintegrate painting with the decorative arts. They wanted new medieval guilds to combat machine-made bric-a-brac that was flooding the consumer market with bad design in the mid-1850s. One do-it-themselves attempt was made when Oxford University buildings were under construction in the late 1850s. Rossetti and Burne-Jones hacked away along with the stonemasons, trying to re-create the unified effect of Gothic craftsmen. It was a failure: Rossetti's mural, for example, began to fade within six months. They just did not know enough about what they professed to love. But now, by the lucky hindsight that restores vision, the Pre-Raphaelites seem revolutionaries of their time, eager to better man's artistic experience in a world growing less and less human by virtue of the machine.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.