Elizabeth Prettejohn

In a richly illustrated re-examination of a seminal period in art history, the author of Rossetti and His Circle asks important questions about the pre-Raphaelite artists, their work, their artistic themes, and their influence on the history of art.

The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites

Modernism in the visual arts has been defined as a liberation from the classical inheritance. The excitement of modern art is often seen to lie in its radical break with the past. But according to one standard narrative, the modern discipline of art history began only with a study of ancient art and sculpture. Johann Joachim Winckelmann's History of the Art of Antiquity, first published in 1764, set the precedent for the historical study of the visual arts, and is still the dominant method in art history today. The modern study of art and the making of modern art thus appear to be founded on incompatible principles: the one on the centrality of ancient art; the other on its utter repudiation. Elizabeth Prettejohn's important and revisionist new book starts from an opposite premise: that the modern study of ancient art and the making of modern art are inextricably intertwined. Subjecting Winckelmann's ideas to astute yet sympathetic critique, the author uses exciting theories of reception to construct a new theory of the relationship between ancient and modern art. Relating seminal ancient artifacts (such as Laocoon, the Parthenon Marbles and Venus de Milo) to modern interpretations by the likes of Alma-Tadema, Leighton, Rodin and Picasso, The Modernity of Ancient Sculpture will have strong appeal to students of art history and classics alike.

Greek Sculpture and Modern Art from Winckelmann to Picasso

The Modernity of Ancient Sculpture

Peter Trippi

This important re-evaluation of the Dutch- born painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema traces his personal and artistic journey towards international fame and success in London and investigates how this exceptionally creative artist used his own houses and studios as laboratories to produce vivid paintings of life in ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt. Lawrence Alma-Tadema's paintings were immensely popular among his contemporaries, and have since enchanted a wide audience through the medium of cinema. Anyone who has ever enjoyed the great epic films of antiquity--from Italian silent classics and Cecil B. DeMille to Ridley Scott's Gladiator--will instantly recognize their origins in sets and costumes Alma- Tadema invented. Accompanied by glowing reproductions of the artist's rich and detailed works, this book boldly re-assesses Alma-Tadema's art through the idea of home: from his admiration for the interiors depicted in early Dutch paintings through his fascination with Pompeian ruins, to his creation of large studio houses that were artworks in their own right. Building upon Alma-Tadema's renown as "the archaeologist of artists," the new scholarship in this impressive volume shows how the spaces he created and inhabited with his talented artist-wife Laura and their two daughters reflected an aesthetic vision that has thrilled viewers and other artists for more than a century. Appealing to general and scholarly audiences alike, this book underscores Alma-Tadema's reputation as one of his era's greatest creative talents.

Lawrence Alma-Tadema

When the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood met in 1848, they were to produce a statement of ideas that would revolutionize artistic practice in pre-Victorian England. This book examines why these ideas still retain the power to fascinate and shock 150 years later.

Tate Gallery

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's house in Chelsea was a bohemian enclave in Victorian London, the social centre for such rebels as the visionary painter Edward Burne-Jones, the socialist William Morris, the aesthete James McNeil Whistler and the poet Charles Swinburne. The rumours it aroused mixed fact and fiction to tell of love affairs between artists and models, of noctural rambles and drunken poetry recitations, of the house's collection of Oriental china, medieval musical instruments and exotic animals. But fact of fantasy, the circle's bohemian image was inseparable from their artistic experiments.

Rossetti and His Circle

Julian Treuherz

Edwin Becker

Catalog of the exhibition held at the Walker, Liverpool, Oct. 16, 2003-Jan. 18, 2004, and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Feb. 27-June 6, 2004./Includes bibliographical references (p. 239-243) and index.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

What do we mean when we call a work of art `beautiful`? How have artists responded to changing notions of the beautiful? Which works of art have been called beautiful, and why? Fundamental and intriguing questions to artists and art lovers, but ones that are all too often ignored in discussions of art today. Prettejohn argues that we simply cannot afford to ignore these questions. Charting over two hundred years of western art, she illuminates the vital relationship between our changing notions of beauty and specific works of art, from the works of Kauffman to Whistler, Ingres to Rossetti, Cézanne to Jackson Pollock, and concludes with a challenging question for the future: why should we care about beauty in the twenty-first century?

1750-2000

Beauty and Art

Examines the art of Rossetti and his associates as it was influenced by their bohemian lifestyle

Alison Smith

Jason Rosenfeld

Diane Waggoner

T. J. Barringer

A persuasive new look at the Pre-Raphaelites, who rebelled against the art establishment of their day and strove to ensure that their works changed the society in which they lived

Victorian Art and Design

Pre-Raphaelites

Le revers de la jaquette indique : "With the rise of museums in the 19th century, including the formation in 1824 of the National gallery in London, the art of the past became visible and accessible (in Victorian England) as never before. Inspired by the work of Sandro Botticelli, Jan van Eyck, Diego Velazquez, and others, British artists transformed contemporary art through a creative process that emphasized imitation and emulation. Elizabeth Prettejohn analyzes the ways in which the Old Masters were interpreted by artists, as well as critics, curators, and scholars, and argues that Victorian artists were, paradoxically, at their most original when they imitated the Old Masters most faithfully. Covering Victorian art from the Pre-Raphaelites through to the early modernists, she vividly traces the ways in wich artist such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, and William Orpen engaged with the art of the past to produce some of the greatest art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries."

The Art of Imitation from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War

Modern Painters, Old Masters

A general introduction to the Pre-Raphaelite movement, treating both literature and visual art.

The Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites

Stefano Evangelista

Pater the Classicist is the first book to address in detail Walter Pater's important contribution to the study of classical antiquity. Widely considered our greatest aesthetic critic and now best known as a precursor to modernist writers and post-modernist thinkers of the twentieth century, Pater was also a classicist by profession who taught at the University of Oxford. He wrote extensively about Greek art and philosophy, but also authored an influential historical novel set in ancient Rome, Marius the Epicurean, and a variety of short stories depicting the survival of classical culture in later ages. These superficially diverging interests actually went closely hand-in-hand: it can plausibly be asserted that it is the classical tradition in its broadest sense, including the question of how to understand its workings and temporalities, which forms Pater's principal subject as a writer. Although he initially approached antiquity obliquely, through the Italian Renaissance, for example, or the poetry of William Morris, later in his career he wrote more, and more directly, about the ancient world, and particularly about Greece, his first love. The essays in this collection cover all his major works and reveal a many-sided and inspirational figure, whose achievements helped to reinvigorate the classical studies that were the basis of the English educational system of the nineteenth century, and whose conception of Classics as cross-disciplinary and outward-looking can be a model to scholars and students today. They discuss his classicism generally, his fiction set in classical antiquity, his writings on Greek art and culture, and those on ancient philosophy, and in doing so they also illuminate Pater's position within his Victorian context, among figures such as J. A. Symonds, Henry Nettleship, Vernon Lee, and Jane Harrison, as well as his place in the study and reception of Classics today.

Elizabeth Prettejohn

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