UnEnglish triumph

Sometimes an exhibition does what it says on the tin. The Pre-Raphaelites and Italy, the Ashmolean’s first major show post-revamp, is such an exhibition.

Sometimes an exhibition does what it says on the tin. The Pre-Raphaelites and Italy, the Ashmolean’s first major show post-revamp, is such an exhibition.

This fidelity is simultaneously its strength and its weakness. In a dazzling and far-reaching show, the exhibition organisers ultimately leave us questioning the nature and meaning not only of Pre-Raphaelitism but also of 19th-century concepts of Italy. This may be part of the exhibition’s achievement. It does not make for the easy ride exhibition-goers have come to expect from the Pre-Raphaelites. In place of those all-too-familiar lusciously coloured images of narcotic sexiness and tantalising sidelights on to their creators’ erratic private lives, we are presented with 140 pictures produced by a large group of artists. Their subject matter varies, as does their treatment and indeed their inspiration. Precise architectural watercolours, prompted by Ruskin’s terror that the Italians would make a ham fist of restoring their own heritage, jostle for attention with jewel-bright meditations on a Mediterranean Neverland mostly indebted to Browning, droopy Burne-Jones angels and, wherever you look, versions of Dante’s distinctive profile, like some hawk-nosed presiding deity. It’s exhilarating if demanding stuff.

Some stars emerge. William Dyce, whose work demonstrates as many Nazarene as Pre-Raphaelite qualities, painted ‘The Meeting of Jacob and Rachel’ four times. It was a composition worth revisiting. Luminously lovely, its colours as clear and unsullied as those of a porcelain plaque, it successfully combines ardour with chasteness. Rachel’s maiden blush is as deep and winning as that of the young Lady Diana Spencer. It hangs alongside a picture by Arthur Hughes, ‘That was a Piedmontese’, acclaimed by Ruskin as ‘a little treasure’.