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 MEG – 01 /2020-21
Answer all questions.

1. Locate Chaucer’s Prologue to the Canterbury Tales within his vast writing career, as a social
commentary of the age. 20

The age of Chaucer covers the period from 1340 to 1400. Chaucer is the true representative of
his age as Pope is of the eighteenth century and Tennyson is of the Victorian era. His works
breathe the political, social, economic and religious tendencies of his time. The middle of the
fourteenth century was the transitional period in which Chaucer was born. The elements of
Renaissance were breeding. “He stands on the threshold of the new age, but still hedged in a
backward gazing world.” The fourteenth century in England was the most important of the
mediaeval centuries. It covered the period of the Black Death and the Peasant’s Revolt, the
Hundred Years War with France and the great economic and social changes which we associate
with the decay of villeinage. During its years, two kings were deposed and murdered, and
dynasties began to rise and fall. The antagonism to the church and the demand for the freedom
of thought, which was to culminate in the Renaissance and the Reformation were beginning to
be manifested in this pregnant century. It was of supreme importance for the understanding of
English history that we should have a dramatic, piquant and all embracing picture of real
mediaeval life before the great changes should arrive and Chaucer has given us this picture in
his Canterbury Tales. During the English Period, Chaucer appears to us as a great original poet.
He had learnt almost to perfection the arts of description, narrativisation and characterization.
Chaucer is known for his technique of versification like that of a fine craftsman and a supreme
writer because of his humour and personal talk. This period includes his remarkable work, The
Canterbury Tales. In this poem he truly represented the comedy of life in its all forms. The
Prologue to The Canterbury Tales gives us the background of the actions and movements of the
pilgrims who make up the company of the members of the troop who undertook this
pilgrimage. All these pilgrims represent the whole of “English society” of the fourteenth
century. The pilgrims are persons of all ranks and classes of society; and in the inimitable
description of their manners, dresses, person, horses etc, with which the poet has introduced
them, we behold a vast and minute portrait gallery of the social state of England in the
fourteenth century. They are – a knight, a squire, a yeoman or military retainer of the class of
the three peasants, who in the quality of the archer was bound to accompany his feudal lord to
war, a prioress, a lady of monk, superior of a nunnery, a nun and three priests in attendance
upon this lady; a Monk, a person represented as handsomely dressed and equipped and
passionately fond of hunting and good cheer; a friar, or monk, a merchant, a clerk or student of
the University of Oxford; a sergeant of the law; a franklin or rich country–gentlemen, five
wealthy burgesses or trademen, described in general but vigorous and characteristic terms;

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they are Haberdasher or dealer in silk and cloth, a carpenter, a weaver, a dyer and a tappisser
or maker of carpets and hangings, a cook or rather what in old French is called Rotisseur i.e. the
keeper of a cook’s shop; a shipman, the master of a trading vessel; a doctor of Physic; a wife of
Bath, a rich cloth manufacturer, a Parson, or Secular Parish priest; a ploughman, the brother of
the preceding personage; a miller; a manciple or steward of a lawyer’s hostel or inn of court; a
Reeve, bailiff or interdant of the estates of some wealthy landowner; a summoner, an officer in
the then formidable ecclesiastical courts, whose duty was to summon or cite before the
spiritual tribunal those who had offended against the cannon laws; a Pardoner, or vendor of the
Indulgences from Rome. To these thirty persons must be added Chaucer himself and the Host
of the Tabard, making in all thirty two. The Canterbury Pilgrims are described so realistically and
graphically that one gets a great enjoyment in reading The Prologue. Chaucer was regarded as
the greatest writer of his age, (the fourteenth century), for he was widely read, imitated, and
quoted; even some of his success in the material world was probably a reward for his skill with
his pen. Three qualities are outstanding in his writings; a humor which is sometimes gentle,
sometimes sly, often satiric, but never vicious quite frequently he is the butt of his own jokes;
an understanding of human beings which is warm and compassionate but never sentimental;
and an acuteness of observation which is unfailing in its ability to discern the most significant
detail. Chaucer’s fame, unlike that of many writers, was great in his own lifetime and has
remained consistently so for over 550 years. The general prologue to The Canterbury Tales, in
some respects the most remarkable product of Chaucer’s genius, is an extended “dramatis
personae” for the collection of tales. In it, Chaucer presents his characters, one by one, in a
series of vivid, detailed, and lifelike portraits, and also sets forth his plan: to have each of his
characters tell two tales on the way to Canterbury and two more on the way back, to while
away the time. The result is a continuous drama, for the tales give rise to altercations and other
byplays and also further characterize their tellers. Chaucer did not live to com- plete his
ambitious project. The Prologue, however shows how fully he grasped it in his own mind. It
would be a mistake to consider the Prologue as merely an introduction. It is a mature and
highly finished work in its own right – the liveliest, most convincing picture of life in the middle
Ages which has come down to us. The language used by Chaucer comes from the Middle
English rather different from the modern English we know.

2. What do you understand by the term renaissance? Examine Spenser’s Prothalamion as an

example of both renaissance writing as well as a nuptial song. 20

The was a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle
Ages to Modernity and covering the 15th and 16th centuries. It occurred after the Crisis of the
Late Middle Ages and was associated with great social change. In addition to the standard
periodization, proponents of a long Renaissance put its beginning in the 14th century and its
end in the 17th century. The traditional view focuses more on the early modern aspects of the

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Renaissance and argues that it was a break from the past, but many historians today focus
more on its medieval aspects and argue that it was an extension of the Middle Ages.
The intellectual basis of the Renaissance was its version of humanism, derived from the concept
of Roman Humanitas and the rediscovery of classical Greek philosophy, such as that
of Protagoras, who said that "Man is the measure of all things." This new thinking became
manifest in art, architecture, politics, science and literature. Early examples were the
development of perspective in oil painting and the recycled knowledge of how to
make concrete. Although the invention of metal movable type sped the dissemination of ideas
from the later 15th century, the changes of the Renaissance were not uniformly experienced
across Europe: the first traces appear in Italy as early as the late 13th century, in particular with
the writings of Dante and the paintings of Giotto.
As a cultural movement, the Renaissance encompassed innovative flowering of Latin and
vernacular literatures, beginning with the 14th-century resurgence of learning based on
classical sources, which contemporaries credited to Petrarch; the development of linear
perspective and other techniques of rendering a more natural reality in painting; and gradual
but widespread educational reform. In politics, the Renaissance contributed to the
development of the customs and conventions of diplomacy, and in science to an increased
reliance on observation and inductive reasoning. Although the Renaissance saw revolutions in
many intellectual pursuits, as well as social and political upheaval, it is perhaps best known for
its artistic developments and the contributions of such polymaths as Leonardo da
Vinci and Michelangelo, who inspired the term "Renaissance man".
The Renaissance began in the 14th century in Florence, Italy. Various theories have been
proposed to account for its origins and characteristics, focusing on a variety of factors including
the social and civic peculiarities of Florence at the time: its political structure, the patronage of
its dominant family, the Medici, and the migration of Greek scholars and their texts to Italy
following the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks which inherited from the Timurid
Renaissance. Other major centres were northern Italian city-states such
as Venice, Genoa, Milan, Bologna, and Rome during the Renaissance Papacy or Belgian cities
such as Bruges, Ghent, Brussels, Leuven or Antwerp.
The Renaissance has a long and complex historiography, and, in line with general scepticism of
discrete periodizations, there has been much debate among historians reacting to the 19th-
century glorification of the "Renaissance" and individual culture heroes as "Renaissance men",
questioning the usefulness of Renaissance as a term and as a historical delineation. The art
historian Erwin Panofsky observed of this resistance to the concept of "Renaissance":
It is perhaps no accident that the factuality of the Italian Renaissance has been most vigorously
questioned by those who are not obliged to take a professional interest in the aesthetic aspects
of civilization – historians of economic and social developments, political and religious
situations, and, most particularly, natural science – but only exceptionally by students of
literature and hardly ever by historians of Art.
Some observers have called into question whether the Renaissance was a cultural "advance"
from the Middle Ages, instead seeing it as a period of pessimism and nostalgia for classical

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antiquity, while social and economic historians, especially of the longue durée, have instead
focused on the continuity between the two eras, which are linked, as Panofsky observed, "by a
thousand ties".
The term rinascita ('rebirth') first appeared in Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists (c. 1550),
anglicized as the Renaissance in the 1830s. The word has also been extended to other historical
and cultural movements, such as the Carolingian Renaissance (8th and 9th centuries), Ottonian
Renaissance (10th and 11th century), and the Renaissance of the 12th century.
Prothalamion, the commonly used name of Prothalamion; or, A Spousall Verse in Honour of
the Double Marriage of Ladie Elizabeth and Ladie Katherine Somerset, is a poem by Edmund
Spenser (1552–1599), one of the important poets of the Tudor period in England. Published
in 1596, it is a nuptial song that he composed that year on the occasion of the twin marriage of
the daughters of the Earl of Worcester, Elizabeth Somerset and Katherine Somerset, to Henry
Guildford and William Petre, 2nd Baron Petre respectively.
Prothalamion is written in the conventional form of a marriage song. The poem begins with a
description of the River Thames where Spenser finds two beautiful maidens. The poet proceeds
to praise them and wishing them all the blessings for their marriages. The poem begins with a
fine description of the day when on which he is writing the poem:
Calm was the day and through the trembling air
The sweet breathing Zephyrus did softly play.
The poet is standing near the Thames River and finds a group of nymphs with baskets collecting
flowers for the new brides. The poet tells us that they are happily making the bridal crowns for
Elizabeth and Katherine. He goes on his poem describing two swans at the Thames, relating it
to the myth of Jove and Leda. According to the myth, Jove falls in love with Leda and comes to
court her in the guise of a beautiful swan. The poet feels that the Thames has done justice to
his nuptial song by "flowing softly" according to his request: "Sweet Thames run softly till I end
my song". The poem is often grouped with Spenser's poem about his own marriage,
the Epithalamion.
American-born British poet T. S. Eliot quotes the line "Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my
song" in his 1922 poem The Waste Land. English composer George Dyson (1883–1964) set
words from Prothalamion to music in his 1954 cantata Sweet Thames Run Softly.

3. Examine any one poem by Donne or Herbert or Marvel as an example of metaphysical

poetry. 20

The term metaphysical poets was coined by the critic Samuel Johnson to describe a loose
group of 17th-century English poets whose work was characterized by the inventive use
of conceits, and by a greater emphasis on the spoken rather than lyrical quality of their verse.
These poets were not formally affiliated and few were highly regarded until 20th century
attention established their importance.

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Given the lack of coherence as a movement, and the diversity of style between poets, it has
been suggested that calling them Baroque poets after their era might be more useful. Once the
Metaphysical style was established, however, it was occasionally adopted by other and
especially younger poets to fit appropriate circumstances.
In the chapter on Abraham Cowley in his Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–81),
Samuel Johnson refers to the beginning of the seventeenth century in which there "appeared a
race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets". This does not necessarily imply
that he intended metaphysical to be used in its true sense, in that he was probably referring to
a witticism of John Dryden, who said of John Donne:
He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only
should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when
he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of love. In this...Mr.
Cowley has copied him to a fault.
Probably the only writer before Dryden to speak of the new style of poetry was Drummond of
Hawthornden, who in an undated letter from the 1630s made the charge that "some men of
late, transformers of everything, consulted upon her reformation, and endeavoured to abstract
her to metaphysical ideas and scholastical quiddities, denuding her of her own habits, and
those ornaments with which she hath amused the world some thousand years".
Johnson's definition of the Metaphysical poets was that of a hostile critic looking back at the
style of the previous century. In 1958 Alvarez proposed an alternative approach in a series of
lectures eventually published as The School of Donne. This was to look at the practice and self-
definition of the circle of friends about Donne, who were the recipients of many of his verse
letters. They were a group of some fifteen young professionals with an interest in poetry, many
of them poets themselves although, like Donne for much of his life, few of them published their
work. Instead, copies were circulated in manuscript among them. Uncertain ascriptions
resulted in some poems from their fraternity being ascribed to Donne by later editors.
A younger second generation was a close-knit group of courtiers, some of them with family or
professional ties to Donne's circle, who initially borrowed Donne's manner to cultivate wit.
Among them were Lord Herbert of Cherbury and his brother George, whose mother Magdalen
was another recipient of verse letters by Donne. Eventually George Herbert, Henry Vaughan
and Richard Crashaw, all of whom knew each other, took up the religious life and extended
their formerly secular approach into this new area. A later generation of Metaphysical poets,
writing during the Commonwealth, became increasingly more formulaic and lacking in vitality.
These included Cleveland and his imitators as well as such transitional figures as Cowley and
Marvell.
What all had in common, according to Alvarez, was esteem, not for metaphysics but for
intelligence. Johnson's remark that "To write on their plan it was at least necessary to read and
think" only echoed its recognition a century and a half before in the many tributes paid to
Donne on his death. For example, Jasper Mayne's comment that for the fellow readers of his
work, "Wee are thought wits, when 'tis understood".Coupled with it went a vigorous sense of
the speaking voice. It begins with the rough versification of the satires written by Donne and

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others in his circle such as Everard Gilpin and John Roe. Later it modulates into the thoughtful
religious poems of the next generation with their exclamatory or conversational openings and
their sense of the mind playing over the subject and examining it from all sides. Helen Gardner
too had noted the dramatic quality of this poetry as a personal address of argument and
persuasion, whether talking to a physical lover, to God, to Christ's mother Mary, or to a
congregation of believers.
Elegists
A different approach to defining the community of readers is to survey who speaks of whom,
and in what manner, in their poetry. On the death of Donne, it is natural that his friend Edward
Herbert should write him an elegy full of high-flown and exaggerated Metaphysical logic. In a
similar way, Abraham Cowley marks the deaths of Crashaw and of another member of Donne's
literary circle, Henry Wotton. Here, however, though Cowley acknowledges Crashaw briefly as a
writer ("Poet and saint"), his governing focus is on how Crashaw's goodness transcended his
change of religion. The elegy is as much an exercise in a special application of logic as was
Edward Herbert's on Donne. Henry Wotton, on the other hand, is not remembered as a writer
at all, but instead for his public career. The conjunction of his learning and role as ambassador
becomes the extended metaphor on which the poem's tribute turns.
Twelve “Elegies upon the Author” accompanied the posthumous first collected edition of
Donne's work, Poems by J.D. with elegies of the author’s death (1633) and were reprinted in
subsequent editions over the course of the next two centuries. Though the poems were often
cast in a suitably Metaphysical style, half were written by fellow clergymen, few of whom are
remembered for their poetry. Among those who are were Henry King and Jasper Mayne, who
was soon to quit authorship for clerical orders. Bishop Richard Corbet's poetry writing was also
nearly over by now and he contributed only a humorous squib. Other churchmen included
Henry Valentine (fl 1600-50), Edward Hyde (1607-59) and Richard Busby. Two poets, Lucius
Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland and Thomas Carew, who were joined in the 1635 edition by Sidney
Godolphin, had links with the heterodox Great Tew Circle. They also served as courtiers, as did
another contributor, Endymion Porter. In addition, Carew had been in the service of Edward
Herbert.
Isaac Walton’s link with Donne’s circle was more tangential. He had friends within the Great
Tew Circle but at the time of his elegy was working as a researcher for Henry Wotton, who
intended writing a life of the poet. This project Walton inherited after his death, publishing it
under his own name in 1640; it was followed by a life of Wotton himself that prefaced the
collection of Wotton's works in 1651. A life of George Herbert followed them in 1670. The links
between Donne’s elegists were thus of a different order from those between Donne and his
circle of friends, often no more than professional acquaintanceship. And once the poetic style
had been launched, its tone and approach remained available as a model for later writers who
might not necessarily commit themselves so wholly to it.

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4. Critically examine Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience as precursors of the
Romantic Age. 20

Songs of Innocence and of Experience is a collection of illustrated poems by William Blake. It

appeared in two phases: a few first copies were printed and illuminated by Blake himself in
1789; five years later he bound these poems with a set of new poems in a volume titled Songs
of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. Blake was
also a painter before the creation of Songs of Innocence and Experience and had painted such
subjects as Oberon, Titania, and Puck dancing with fairies.
"Innocence" and "Experience" are definitions of consciousness that rethink Milton's existential-
mythic states of "Paradise" and "Fall". Often, interpretations of this collection centre around a
mythical dualism, where "Innocence" represents the "unfallen world" and "Experience"
represents the "fallen world".Blake categorizes our modes of perception that tend to
coordinate with a chronology that would become standard in Romanticism: childhood is a state
of protected innocence rather than original sin, but not immune to the fallen world and its
institutions. This world sometimes impinges on childhood itself, and in any event becomes
known through "experience", a state of being marked by the loss of childhood vitality, by fear
and inhibition, by social and political corruption and by the manifold oppression of Church,
State and the ruling classes. The volume's "Contrary States" are sometimes signalled by
patently repeated or contrasted titles: in Innocence, Infant Joy, in Experience, Infant Sorrow;
in Innocence, The Lamb, in Experience, The Fly and The Tyger. The stark simplicity of poems
such as The Chimney Sweeper and The Little Black Boy display Blake's acute sensibility to the
realities of poverty and exploitation that accompanied the "Dark Satanic Mills" of the Industrial
Revolution.
Poems from both books have been set to music by many composers, including Ralph Vaughan
Williams, Joseph Holbrooke, John Frandsen, Per Drud Nielsen, Sven-David Sandström, Benjamin
Britten, and Jacob ter Veldhuis. Individual poems have also been set by, among others, John
Tavener, Victoria Poleva, Jah Wobble, Tangerine Dream, Jeff Johnson, and Daniel Amos. A
modified version of the poem "The Little Black Boy" was set to music in the song "My Mother
Bore Me" from Maury Yeston's musical Phantom. The folk musician Greg Brown recorded
sixteen of the poems on his 1987 album Songs of Innocence and of Experienceand by Finn
Coren in his Blake Project.
The poet Allen Ginsberg believed the poems were originally intended to be sung, and that
through study of the rhyme and metre of the works, a Blakean performance could be
approximately replicated. In 1969, he conceived, arranged, directed, sang on, and played piano
and harmonium for an album of songs entitled Songs of Innocence and Experience by William
Blake, tuned by Allen Ginsberg (1970).
American composer and producer David Axelrod produced two solo albums, Song of Innocence
(1968) and Songs of Experience (1969) which were homages to the mystical poetry and
paintings of William Blake.
The composer William Bolcom completed a setting of the entire collection of poems in 1984. In
2005, a recording of Bolcom's work by Leonard Slatkin, the Michigan State Children's Choir, and

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the University of Michigan on the Naxos label won four Grammy Awards: Best Choral
Performance, Best Classical Contemporary Composition, Best Classical Album, and Best
Producer of the Year (classical).
The composer Victoria Poleva completed "Songs of Innocence and of Experience" in 2002, a
chamber cycle on the verses by Blake for soprano, clarinet and accordion. It was first performed
by the ensemble Accroche-Note of France.
The Swedish composer David Unger completed "Night songs op. 24", a setting of five poems
from Songs of Innocence for solo voice and piano in 2013. It was first performed by baritone
Anthony Schneider and pianist Rosemary Barnes in Vienna, Austria the same year.
Popular group Tangerine Dream based their album Tyger on lyrics by William Blake.
Popular rock group U2 released an album called Songs of Innocence in 2014, and followed it in
2017 with Songs of Experience.
Karl Jenkins' Motets includes a setting of The Shepherd.
The fictional rock band Infant Sorrow, as featured in the 2008 film Forgetting Sarah Marshall,
appears to be named after the Blake poem.

5. Who were the Pre- Raphaelites? Critically appreciate any one poem of this age/movement
and highlight the characteristics of the movement. 20

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (later known as the Pre-Raphaelites) was a group

of English painters, poets, and art critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John
Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic
George Stephens and Thomas Woolner who formed a seven-member "Brotherhood" modelled
in part on the Nazarene movement. The Brotherhood was only ever a loose association and
their principles were shared by other artists of the time, including Ford Madox Brown, Arthur
Hughes and Marie Spartali Stillman. Later followers of the principles of the Brotherhood
included Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris and John William Waterhouse.
The group sought a return to the abundant detail, intense colours and complex compositions
of Quattrocento Italian art. They rejected what they regarded as the mechanistic approach first
adopted by Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphael and Michelangelo. The Brotherhood
believed the Classical poses and elegant compositions of Raphael in particular had been a
corrupting influence on the academic teaching of art, hence the name "Pre-Raphaelite". In
particular, the group objected to the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds, founder of the
English Royal Academy of Arts, whom they called "Sir Sloshua". To the Pre-Raphaelites,
according to William Michael Rossetti, "sloshy" meant "anything lax or scamped in the process
of painting ... and hence ... any thing or person of a commonplace or conventional kind".The
group associated their work with John Ruskin, an English critic whose influences were driven by
his religious background.

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The group continued to accept the concepts of history painting and mimesis, imitation of
nature, as central to the purpose of art. The Pre-Raphaelites defined themselves as a reform
movement, created a distinct name for their form of art, and published a periodical, The Germ,
to promote their ideas. The group's debates were recorded in the Pre-Raphaelite Journal. The
group separated after almost five years. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in John
Millais's parents' house on Gower Street, London in 1848. At the first meeting, the
painters John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Holman Hunt were present.
Hunt and Millais were students at the Royal Academy of Arts and had met in another loose
association, the Cyclographic Club, a sketching society. At his own request Rossetti became a
pupil of Ford Madox Brown in 1848. At that date, Rossetti and Hunt shared lodgings
in Cleveland Street, Fitzrovia, Central London. Hunt had started painting The Eve of St.
Agnes based on Keats's poem of the same name, but it was not completed until 1867.
As an aspiring poet, Rossetti wished to develop the links between Romantic poetry and art. By
autumn, four more members, painters James Collinson and Frederic George Stephens,
Rossetti's brother, poet and critic William Michael Rossetti, and sculptor Thomas Woolner, had
joined to form a seven-member-strong brotherhood. Ford Madox Brown was invited to join,
but the more senior artist remained independent but supported the group throughout the PRB
period of Pre-Raphaelitism and contributed to The Germ. Other young painters and sculptors
became close associates, including Charles Allston Collins, and Alexander Munro. The PRB
intended to keep the existence of the brotherhood secret from members of the Royal
Academy.

The Pre-Raphaelites were a loose and baggy collective of Victorian poets, painters, illustrators
and designers whose tenure lasted from 1848 to roughly the turn of the century. Drawing
inspiration from visual art and literature, their work privileged atmosphere and mood over
narrative, focusing on medieval subjects, artistic introspection, female beauty, sexual yearning
and altered states of consciousness. In defiant opposition to the utilitarian ethos that formed
the dominant ideology of the mid-century, the Pre-Raphaelites helped to popularise the notion
of ‘art for art’s sake’. Generally devoid of the political edge that characterised much Victorian
art and literature, Pre-Raphaelite work nevertheless incorporated elements of 19th-century
realism in its attention to detail and in its close observation of the natural world.

Driven by, as Oscar Wilde put it, ‘three things the English public never forgives: youth, power
and enthusiasm’, Pre-Raphaelitism found itself paradoxically poised between nostalgia for the
past and excitement about the future. 19th-century disagreements over whether their art was
forward-thinking or retrogressive set a precedent for current critical debates about the extent
to which their work should be considered ‘avant-garde’.

Pre-Raphaelitism began in 1848 when a group of seven young artists banded together against
what they felt was an artificial and mannered approach to painting taught at London’s Royal
Academy of Arts. They called themselves the ‘Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’ (PRB), a name that
alluded to their preference for late medieval and early Renaissance art that came ‘before
Raphael’. The painters were: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais,

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James Collinson and Frederic George Stephens. The non-painters were sculptor Thomas
Woolner and Brotherhood secretary William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s brother.
Inspired by the work of old masters such as Van Eyck, Memling, Mantegna, Giotto and Fra
Angelico, and following a programme of ‘truth to nature’, the artists advocated a return to the
simplicity and sincerity of subject and style found in an earlier age. Their aims were vague and
contradictory, even paradoxical, which was only to be expected from a youthful movement
made up of strong-minded individuals who sought to modernise art by reviving the practices of
the Middle Ages.
Characterised by flattened perspective, sharp outlines, bright colours and close attention to
detail that flouted classical conventions of symmetry, proportion and carefully
controlled chiaroscuro, early PRB paintings of religious subjects such as Hunt’s A Converted
British Family’, Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents and Rossetti’s Ecce Ancilla
Domini (1850) shocked critics with a hyper-realism perceived to be at odds with the sacred
events portrayed. The 1850 Royal Academy Exhibition inaugurated what would remain an
antagonistic relationship between establishment critics and the Pre-Raphaelites. Critics were
particularly dismayed at the hints of Tractarianism and Romishness they detected in the
detailed, ecclesiastic symbolism of Millais’ picture. They were further horrified by the painter’s
blasphemous depiction of the Christ child as a red-headed member of an unidealised labouring-
class family. Both Hunt’s and Millais’s paintings hinted at the breakdown of the social order, a
worrying subject during a period where recent revolutions in Europe threatened to spread to
Britain.

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