At the National Gallery of Modern Art, the exhibition which examines the rapport between British 19th-century art and Italian art culture from the middle ages to the renaissance.
The itinerary starts off with landscapes by William Turner inspired by the Italian countryside, and includes water-colors and drawings by John Ruskin as an introduction to the widespread rediscovery of the charm and atmosphere resulting for the vogue for ‘primitive’ to late 16th-century Italian art. The main body of the exhibition includes the pre-Raphaelites Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris and concludes with the particular decline of Classicism in the sphere of the Royal Academy in the work of artists like Frederic Leighton, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and representatives of esthetic and symbolist culture like George Moore and George F. Watts. The catalogue contains interesting contributions by Robert Upstone, Stephen Wildman, Mark Bills, Silvia Danesi Squarzina and Maria Teresa Benedetti.