Lord Frederick Leighton
1830 - 1896
English Victorian Neo-classicist Painter, Chiefly associated with
the second generation of the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB)
Artistically and
stylistically influenced the following painters and art periods;
Early
Renaissance,
Byzantine Style,
Gothic era, Ambrogio
Lorenzetti, William
Holman Hunt and
John Everett
Millais
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The term Pre-Raphaelites refers to High Renaissance artist Raphael. Some members of the PRB referred to Raphael's work utter rubbish and criticized his decadent themes and depraved lifestyle. Raphael died of syphilis and was known as a drunkard and carouser. They took particular issue with Raphael's leering cherubs and eroticized angels. Dante Rossetti and the other (PRB) artists embraced the artistic manner of Mediaeval and Early Renaissance painters; Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Paolo Veneziano, Andrea del Verrocchio and Giotto Bondone. The (PRB) felt that these painters infused their works with spiritual symbolism, godliness and sacred themes.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) was founded in 1848. The most important artist was a handsome and charming painter named Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Rossetti and his chums, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, rejected Neoclassical and High Renaissance art and embraced the spiritually infused works of the Early Renaissance, Byzantine Style and Gothic painters. They sought to created a new artistic style using biblical, mythological, and literary imagery as the subjects of their art-works. Their paintings often contain obscure visual symbols and secret riddles.
The idealistic Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painters wanted to change the world with their art, much like the hippies of the 1960s. They scorned the pretentious conventionality of the Victorian era. They sought a return to spirituality, courtliness, brotherly love and religious piousness. They rebelled against the unbridled materialism and rampant hypocrisy that was typical of the Victorian middle and upper classes. John Ruskin, famous Victorian Art Critic and major influence on the PRB warned "We live in an age of base conceit and baser servility—an age whose intellect is chiefly formed by pillage, and occupied in desecration; one day mimicking, the next destroying, the works of all the noble persons who made its intellectual or art life possible to it:—an age without honest confidence enough in itself to carve a cherry-stone with an original fancy, but with insolence enough to abolish the solar system, if it were allowed to meddle with it. In the midst of all this, you have to become lowly and strong" Many of the (PRB) members would spend weekends out in the woods communing with nature and God.
Lord Frederick
Leighton's favorite
subject matter
mythology
Arthurian legends
femme fatale
Italian themes
classical themes
historical themes
literary themes
mermaids
wood nymphs
Writers who influenced Frederick Leighton
Goethe
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
John Keats
Shakespeare
Coventry Patmore
Charles Dickens
Tennyson
Dinah Maria Mulock
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