Reproduction and Transformation

Before the Renaissance, religious painting was largely about the narrative. The iconography of the Madonna, for example, is well established in early Christian art. But with the Renaissance, came a shift to painting as an independent form of artistic expression. In fact, many of the most important ideas in Western art can be traced back to this period. The Renaissance also introduced new types of visual imagery and style such as linear perspective and chiaroscuro.

The invention of movable type by Johann Gutenberg in the mid 15th century meant that books could now be produced in quantity at a reasonable price. This led to a slow democratization of knowledge — more people had access to more book, which meant that they had easier access to information that might not have been so readily available otherwise.

The earlier artistic traditions of Europe were challenged by the introduction of new ideas from Africa, South America and Asia during expeditions by conquerors such as Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama as well as artists like Caravaggio and Velasquez. These cultural encounters led to new ways of seeing, drawing and depicting subjects on canvas.

Art, from the beginning, has been about reproducing things. The earliest art was about reproducing what your eyes saw. And as time went on art became about reproducing what your eyes saw better. It became about reproducing things that weren’t there.

A good example is the art of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. In the mid-1800s, artists in England and France started trying to paint like they were looking at their subjects with a camera instead of their eyes. Not literally; they didn’t use cameras, and they didn’t use lenses (although some of them may have used mirrors). They just aimed for something like literal realism, but more convincing than literal realism.

The result was a lot of strange and wonderful paintings and prints, some of which are still famous today. John Everett Millais’ “Ophelia” is probably the best known example, but “The Golden Stairs” by William Holman Hunt or “Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead” by Arnold Böcklin are worth looking at too if you can find them.

The invention of photography forever changed the way people thought about art. Before the camera, artists painted what they saw. After that, it became acceptable for them to paint what they wanted to see.

The invention of the camera had a similar effect on literature—but not until much later. Before the advent of film and video, fiction was expected to be realistic. The first draft of every story was supposed to be based on experience. Even fantasy stories were expected to follow the laws of physics as we understand them.

This expectation began to fade in the 1800s with the works of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, but it was not until after World War II that science fiction began to be widely accepted as a genre in its own right. Even then, there were arguments against it—science fiction wasn’t real enough. If you want realism, one critic said, “you wouldn’t read this stuff anyway.”

But science fiction quickly became a staple of bookstores and libraries and then movie theaters and television sets—and now on computer screens and handheld devices. There are scores if not hundreds of science fiction movies every year, with budgets running into hundreds of millions of dollars. Science fiction is taken for granted today because we have become used to it—it

The term “Renaissance” was first used by the French historian Jules Michelet (1798-1874), who published his book Histoire de France (The History of France) in 1833. He used the word Renaissance to describe a cultural rebirth, which he believed began in 14th century Italy and spread to the rest of Europe.

Towards the end of the 19th century, English writers also adopted the term to describe the cultural changes that had occurred in Britain between 1550 and 1650. In 1855, art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900) published an academic paper entitled The Nature of Gothic, in which he claimed that Gothic architecture was born from a spirit of rebellion against classical art and culture.

In his book Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1904), William Michael Rossetti defined “Pre-Raphaelitism” as “the qualities that distinguished it from Neoclassicism”. As well as rebellion against established classical models, Pre-Raphaelitism was characterised by realist subject matter; attention to detail; close physical observation; linear draughtsmanship and vivid colouring.

A few years later, in 1907, another art critic, Roger Fry (1866

The Pre-Raphaelites were an artistic movement founded in the 1850s by a group of British artists and poets. Their work was heavily influenced by Medievalism, specifically Chaucerian England. The best known of these Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painters were John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt.

The Pre-Raphaelites were against the academic art that was popular at the time. They rejected what they called “photographic” art, meaning anything that looked like a photograph. This is odd, because in their own time, artists were already introducing photography into their work.

Toulouse-Lautrec is probably the most famous artist to use photographs in his paintings. But there are many other examples from this period including Whistler’s The White Girl (1862) which uses a photograph of his model as a starting point for his painting (the photo can be seen above).

The late 19th century saw a rise of a new artistic movement, which was led by the artists who were not satisfied with the then current fashion of art. They were known as Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and they aimed to revolutionize the art world by their work and ideas.

A major change that took place in the mid 19th century art world was the invention of photography. Photography became a popular form of reproduction of works of arts, which conflicted with the traditional notions of artists and art lovers. The idea of seeing an exact copy of a famous painting or sculpture in one’s own house was very offensive to them.

The use of photography was considered as an act of stealing or even plagiarism by those who wanted to preserve the value of fine arts. There were many legal battles between photographers and artists, where photographers were trying to prove that they are not plagiarizing, but rather reproducing works legally.*

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of people comprising painters and poets who wanted to revolutionize the art world by their work and ideas. Even though they did not invent this new way of thinking, they certainly contributed to it. This can be proven by analyzing their paintings and poems.

They painted figures that looked alive and natural, which

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed in 1848. They were an English artistic movement, characterized by the application of vivid color and meticulous detail to depict subjects from nature.

The members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood reacted against what they considered to be the constrained compositions, lack of vibrant color, and shallow emotionalism of previous artists. The artist John Everett Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents (1850) typified their work: detailed and realistic, but slower than some contemporary works.

In private, however, Hunt and his colleagues were much more radical. They believed that it was the duty of the artist to create works of beauty for their own sake, rather than to illustrate moral or religious themes. This belief derived from the writings of critic John Ruskin who argued that a work of art should contain all elements of beauty, including color, line, form and space. Hunt believed in both increasing the use of color and enriching its tone when painted on large surfaces such as canvas or paper. He also believed that the subject of a painting should not be dictated by a literary source, but should come from direct observation: “truth to nature” was a recurring theme in his writings on art before he turned to painting full-time