The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (386 page)

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
.

The name adopted in 1848 by a group of young English artists who shared a dismay at what they considered the moribund state of British painting and hoped to recapture the sincerity and simplicity of early Italian art (i.e. before the time of
Raphael
, whom they saw as the fountainhead of academism). The nucleus of the group was formed by three fellow students at the
Royal Academy
—John Everett
Millais
, William Holman
Hunt
, and Dante Gabriel
Rossetti
(to whom, son of an Italian ex-revolutionary, the sealing of the group into a secret Brotherhood was due). The other four original brethren were James
Collinson
, the sculptor Thomas
Woolner
, and the art critics W. M. Rossetti (1829–1919) and F. G. Stephens (1828–1907). Ford Madox
Brown
was closely allied with them, though not at any time a member of the Brotherhood. The movement had a strong literary flavour from the start, and the members published a journal called
The Germ
. They chose religious or other morally uplifting themes and had a desire for fidelity to nature that they expressed through detailed observation of flora, etc., and the use of a clear, bright, sharp-focus technique. The kind of pictures they hated were academic ‘machines’ and trivial
genre
scenes. The initials PRB were first used on Rossetti's picture
The Girlhood of Mary Virgin
(Tate, London), exhibited in 1849, and were adopted by the other members of the Brotherhood. When their meaning became known in 1850 the group was subjected to violent criticism and abuse. Charles Dickens led the attack in his periodical
Household Words
, calling Millais's
Christ in the House of His Parents
(Tate) ‘mean, odious, revolting and repulsive’. He was outraged by the implied rejection of Raphael (still unquestioningly thought of by many critics as the greatest painter who ever lived), and he regarded the claim to go behind Raphael as an antiprogressive reversion to primitivism and ugliness. The fortunes of the Pre-Raphaelites improved after they were publicly defended by
Ruskin
in 1851, and they attracted numerous followers, including
Deverell
and
Hughes
. By 1853, however, the group had virtually dissolved. Apart from their youthful revolutionary spirit (they were very young in 1848) and their romantic if uninformed medievalism, the prime movers had little in common as artists and they went their separate ways. Of the original members only Hunt remained true to PRB doctrines. Millais adopted a much looser style and went on to become the most popular and successful painter of the day. Curiously, however, it was Rossetti, the least committed to PRB ideals (he never cultivated painstaking detail), who continued the name. Although his later work, made up principally of languorous depictions of
femmes fatales
, is entirely different from his Pre-Raphaelite pictures, the name stuck to him and to his followers such as
Morris
and
Burne-Jones
. Thus in the popular imagination the term ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ conjures up pictures of medieval romance, and ironically a movement that began as a rebellion against artificiality and sentimentality is now itself identified with a kind of escapism. This second wave of pseudomedieval Pre-Raphaelitism began in the 1860s and survived into the 20th cent., in the work, for example, of Evelyn
De Morgan
.

 
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(1613–99).
Italian
Baroque
painter. He came from Taverna in Calabria (hence his nickname) and his prolific career took him to many different parts of Italy (and according to an early biographer to Spain and Flanders). His early work includes groups of musicians and card-players, strongly
Caravaggesque
in style, but later he excelled mainly in frescos on religious subjects. In this field his main model was
Lanfranco
, whom he succeeded in the decoration of S. Andrea della Valle in Rome (1650–1). After the plague of 1656 carried off virtually a whole generation of artists in Naples, Preti worked with great success there, gaining many important commissions. They included a series of seven frescos commemorating the plague for the city gates; they no longer survive, but two
modelli
for them are in the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples and give some idea of how powerful the huge frescos must have been. In 1661 Preti moved to Malta, where he lived for the rest of his life. Several churches on the island, including the cathedral of Valletta, have decorations by him.

 
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Primary Structures
.

Name given to a type of sculpture that came to prominence in the mid-1960s, characterized by a preference for extremely simple geometrical shapes and frequently a use of industrially fabricated elements. The term was popularized by an exhibition entitled ‘Primary Structures’ at the Jewish Museum, New York, in 1966. Among the artists who worked in this vein were Carl
Andre
, Donald
Judd
, Sol
Lewitt
, Robert
Morris
, and Tony
Smith
. Primary Structures comes within the scope of
Minimal art
and the two terms have sometimes been used synonymously.

 
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(1504/5–70).
Italian painter, architect, and decorator, mainly active in France. He was born in Bologna and developed his all-round skills as
Giulio
Romano's assistant in Mantua. In 1532 he was called to France by Francis I and worked with
Rosso
at Fontainebleau. Together they provided the main impetus for the distinctive French type of
Mannerism
known as the School of
Fontainebleau
. Their respective shares in the creation of the new manner—particularly the highly influential combination of paintings with
stucco
ornament—are uncertain. Rosso is often accorded primacy, but
Vasari
said ‘the first works in stucco that were done in France, and the first labours in fresco of any account, had their origin, it is said, in Primaticcio.’ His elongated figure style also had wide influence in France. Primaticcio took over the direction of the work at Fontainbleau on Rosso's death in 1540 and in the 1540s he twice visited Rome to buy antiquities or have casts made for Francis. In his later years Primaticcio turned more to architecture and his work helped to introduce
Renaissance
elements into France.

 
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