out the year 1850, banded themselves together into
a society which they called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The title
indicates their aim, which was to draw the inspiration of their art
from the fifteenth-century painters of Italy. The sweetness of feeling
in a picture such as Botticelli's 'Nativity,' the delicacy of
workmanship and beautiful painting of detail in Antonello's 'St.
Jerome' and other pictures of that date, had an irresistible
fascination for them. They fancied and felt that these artists had
attained to the highest of which art was capable, so that the best
could only again be produced by a faithful study of their methods.
The aims of the Brotherhood were not imitation of the artists but of
the methods of the past. They held that every painted object, and every
painted figure should be as true as it could be made to the object
as it actually existed, rather than to the effect produced upon the
eye, seeing it in conjunction with other objects.

These men heralded a widespread medieval revival, but all the study
in the world could not make them paint like born artists of the
fifteenth century. Yet there are those who think that much of the spirit
of beauty, which had dwelt in the soul of Botticelli and his
contemporaries, was born again in Rossetti and Burne-Jones. Their
feeling for beauty of form and purity of colour, and their aloofness
from the modern world, impart to their work an atmosphere that may
remind us of the fifteenth century, though the fifteenth century could
never have produced it.

Rossetti and Burne-Jones, indeed, never formally joined the
Brotherhood, though they were influenced by its ideals and pursued
the same strict fidelity to nature in all the accessories of a picture.
Millais and Holman Hunt, original members of the Brotherhood, painted
men and women of the mid-Victorian epoch with every detail of their
peaked bonnets and plaid shawls, and were comparatively indifferent
to beauty of form and face. But Rossetti and Burne-Jones created a
type of ideal beauty which they employed on their canvases with
persistent repetition. Burne-Jones founded his type upon the angels
of Botticelli, and his drapery is like that of the ring of dancers
in the sky in our picture of the 'Nativity.' You are probably familiar
with some of his pictures and perhaps have felt the spell of his pure
gem-like colouring and pale, haunting faces. It was the people of their
minds' eye who sat beside their easel