AFA Summer 2018

2018 Antiques & Fine Art 107 Fig. 4: John Everett Millais (1829-1896), Mariana, 1851. Oil on panel, 23 ½ x 19 ½ inches. Tate, London, Accepted by HM Government in lieu of tax and allocated to the Tate Gallery (1999, T07553). Image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. limited to a small number of works in London’s National Gallery. Hunt recalled in his memoir that, at their first meeting, Millais had shared a set of Carlo Lasinio’s copies after the frescoes in the Campo Santo, Pisa, which had been made by numerous artists and finished in the mid-fifteenth century by the Florentine Benozzo Gozzoli (ca. 1421–1497). The significance of this mediated experience of art cannot be overstated. Hunt admits that initially the Pre-Raphaelites were not looking directly at early Italian paintings but at prints after frescoes. Given the brotherhood’s lack of exposure to early Italian art, it might seem incongruous that they gave themselves a name with a direct Italian association. Yet early Netherlandish artists are also accurately classified in the generation before Raphael. The 1842 acquisition of Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (1434) by the National Gallery, London, made one of the most critical impacts on the development of the early PRB style. The Arnolfini Portrait was a rare example from the early Netherlandish school on public view in London at that time, and Rossetti and Hunt also had