Victorian Medievalism in Pre-Raphaelite Art and Representations of Gender

Abstract

The Middle Ages were looked back by Victorian artists such as the Pre-Raphaelites. The period inspired many authors and artists of the time to embed morality within their works. Pre-Raphaelitism had a direct reference to both art and literature, including poetry and paintings, in the nineteenth-century England. Early literary works highly inspired the Pre-Raphaelite painters and writers who depicted their portraits from medieval sources. This paper focuses on modern medieval literary works and arts by Victorian writers and painters including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais whose fascination with the Middle Ages as a period in history was expressed in their attempts to revive the values that characterized medieval world. Medieval resources were utilized to escape from the chaos and disorder of Victorian industrial society and to preserve the moral ideals of the traditional English values and norms.