The Pre-Raphaelites in Tuscany
In the golden autumn of 1859 Edward Burne-Jones and his two
friends awoke in Florence. They had already spent several days in Pisa
sketching frescoes in the Campo Santo.
They were there on the advice of the critic John Ruskin. The young painters had come in search of the
real Pre-Raphaelites – artists like Giotto and Fra Angelico who had flourished
in Tuscany at the moment when the Renaissance began to emerge from the late
Medieval world. And now they were staying in the heart of Florence. On their
rambles around the city, as yet untouched by tourism, they stumbled upon angels
and Madonnas, tucked away in green cloisters and tiny chapels.
Above all, they were smitten by Botticelli. Burne-Jones
wrote lovingly about ‘a coronation of the Virgin…heaven beginning six inches
above our heads as it really does. It
was terribly neglected and stuffed up with candles’. In the Accademia, the
Pitti Palace and the Uffizi he discovered more delights – ‘the Spring’ and ‘the
Dancing Choir’. By the late 1870s, the
infatuation with Botticelli was so prevalent among avant-garde British artists,
that it was parodied by Punch, and Gilbert and Sullivan. But Burne-Jones was a
pioneer in his enthusiasm. The sweetness and otherworldliness of Botticelli’s
wistful Madonnas found a new life on his canvases.
Botticelli, Madonna of the Magnificat,
Uffizi, 1481
The impact of this first visit resonated for decades: ‘Oh
dear’, he sighed as he finished breakfast in his studio-house in London a while
later, ‘when I think that this very morning Florence is going on, and I have to
go into that muddle of work upstairs.’
But before he went home, he was able to saunter through Siena, take tea
with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and study the sculpture of Pisano in the
Cathedral there.
Siena Cathedral
I have recently been able to follow in Burne-Jones’s
footsteps, leading fellow Victorian art lovers around Tuscany. We revisited the
medieval cities that he saw as a young man, and those that he was drawn to as
he grew older – Siena, Arezzo, San Gimigniano and of course, Florence. Looking at the early Renaissance through the
eyes of 19th century artists and poets, we found our way back to a
freshness, a more vivid encounter with well-loved images. The wall-paintings of Gozzoli and
Pinturicchio, the altarpieces of Duccio were almost unknown in Victorian
Britain. Burne-Jones came home exclaiming,
‘I want big things to do, and vast spaces, and for common people to see them
and say Oh! – only Oh!’
Piccolomini Library, decorated by
Pinturicchio, 1402-7, Siena Cathedral
Dante’s Divine Comedy was available in English,
thanks to Henry Cary, but was still an acquired taste. Burne-Jones’ friend and fellow artist, D G
Rossetti did not publish his translation of Dante’s ‘Vita Nuova’ and ‘The Early
Italian Poets’ until 1861. 
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Giotto
drawing a portrait of Dante, watercolour, 1852, Private Collection
These young Victorians were breaking new ground in their
desire to explore and reinvigorate the art of Italy before Raphael. But within a
few decades, word had spread, and there were 30,000 English and American
residents in Florence, drawn by the climate and the culture.
For my part, as a history student who was enamoured of the
Burne-Jones and Rossetti drawings I had seen in the Ashmolean, I came to Florence
for the first time in 1989 with my head filled with Pre-Raphaelite drawings of
Dante’s Beatrice. The two worlds – the
Victorian and the early Renaissance – were intertwined. I saw Botticelli’s
heavenly figures, and remembered Burne-Jones’ response to his upbringing in
industrial Birmingham: ‘the more materialistic science becomes, the more angels
I shall paint.’ These were his
prototypes. But it wasn’t just the
subjects, but the manner itself that was drawn from the Italian Quattrocento. There was kinship in the delicacy of the
swaying figures, the blue of the skies above and the green of their gowns.
This is a timely tour, giving us a chance to look again at
Burne-Jones as we approach another anniversary year, with a major exhibition of
his work at Tate Britain in 2018. Without
his encounters with the fresco-cycles of Pisa, the refined panel-paintings of
Florence, and the solemn church decorations of Arezzo and Siena, his yearnings
for the landscape of his imagination would have been unfulfilled. As he wrote
to a friend, many years later, ‘I belong to old Florence.’
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