The Allure of the Middle Ages: The PRB Meet Van Eyck, Inc.

Abstract

The Flemish iconography appealed to Rossetti because it illustrated that tenet which seems to have been a central one to his artistic credo: ut pictora poesis. The late Medieval paintings and illuminations had a strong narrative quality besides picturing and being direct testimonies to a time that absolutely entranced Rossetti. He as well as his younger colleague William Morris associated Medieval Flanders, and the Low Countries by extension, with those stirring times when men were still engaged in what seemed to be good causes for the benefit of the whole of society. The chapter analyses those paintings and illustrations by Rossetti inspired by Flemish history. It is followed by an investigation into Morris’s engagement with Northern European art and social history. Through a comparison of a Middle-Dutch poem with Morris’s translation of the piece, I relate his socialism to a medieval look on life.

I integrated the article “Art-Catholic revisited: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Early Paintings and Northern Renaissance Art,” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies (Spring 2005), 5–14.