Wait, am I recording? You are listening to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. Alright, let's bango. Hello and welcome to Stuff About Things, an Art History Podcast. My name is Lindsay, and I have now been doing this podcast for over seven years. Long enough that I now have my PhD in art history. The episode that you are about to listen to is from the earlier years of the pod, specifically April of 2020. It is, shall we say, one of my kookier performances. If you enjoy it, and I hope that you do, you will probably like every other episode in the podcast catalog. And if you don't, I do hope that you'll consider giving some of the newer ones a listen. They might just be more your speed. But for right now, I'm really glad that you're here, ready to learn some stuff about some things. Past Lindsay, take it away. Hello and welcome to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. The voice that you are hearing right now belongs to me, Lindsay, your friendly self-isolating art history PhD student. I am coming to you today from a closet in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Fear not, it's a large closet. This closet is my permanent home now because the world is on fire. How are y'all doing? I'm fine. If anything, I feel like this is all my fault, because last episode I made fun of the Crystal Skulls. Even though the bananas people who believe in them told me not to do that, I did that, and now there's a pandemic. Blame the skulls, y'all. Blame the skulls. And as always, rate and review this podcast in iTunes or wherever you're currently listening to it. Look at that transition. Now you'd think that being stranded in Wisconsin, now that I'm stranded, I'm choosing to be here, but you'd think that being in Wisconsin with nowhere to go would make working a lot easier. But it doesn't. It just doesn't. Do you know how many napping surfaces there are within a 20-foot radius of me right now? All the napping surfaces. Do you know how much motivation I have to write a dissertation in order to get a PhD in art history at the moment? Very little. Unless you are a faculty member listening, in which case, I am hard at work. The truth, dear listeners, is somewhere in between these two things. Yes, it's hard to be disciplined when everything is on fire. All I do is read the news and obsess over how cute my dog is. He's very cute. But I'm back. I'm here. So let's do this thing. Today is a bit of a throwback episode. Like everybody at the moment. I have had a very hard time concentrating lately. And so I thought back through all of the coursework I've taken in my 10 plus years of school, and I tried to salvage some kind of content from work that I have already done. And one project came to mind. It just happens to be one of my favorite and arguably most successful class projects I have ever done. And it is also wildly time appropriate because it has a touch of plague backstory. If you are listening to this in the future, I should say that I am recording this during April 2020, also known as peak COVID-19 season in the United States. It is also a time of very little library access on account of my university campus being completely shut down and me being sequestered in Wisconsin. So we work with what we have, and what I have right now is a very fond memory of a project I did in college. So here goes. Convincing teachers to let me talk about random stuff so long as it was remotely related to course content. That, my friends, is how I convinced my etymology teacher to allow me to write Greek myths about bugs instead of doing research papers on them, because bugs are gross. You too can live the dream. Except not now because plague. Fair warning that this episode has a bit of PG-13 swearing. Nothing too bad. Just a few H-E-Double hockey sticks thrown about, so if you're not okay with that, uh I don't know what to tell you. Which brings me to the topic of this episode: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their mild obsession with a story by Boccaccio. A story that involved intrigue, murder, corpse dismemberment, and a big ol' thriving pot of basil, as you do. That's right. This is the part where I tell you stuff about a highly specific conflation of things within the world of art history. The pre-Raphaulite Brotherhood, Boccaccio, and a freakin' pot of basil. Though not necessarily in that order. For Isabel, sweet Isabel, will die. Will die a death too lone and incomplete. Now they have taken away her basil sweet. Piteous she looked undead and senseless things, asking for her lost basil amorously. And with melodious chuckle in the strings of her lorn voice, she oftentimes would cry after the pilgrim in his wanderings to ask him where her basil was and why 'twas hid from her. For cruel 'tis, said she, to steal my basil pot away from me. And so she pined and so she died forlorn, imploring for her basil to the last. No heart was there in Florence but did mourn in pity of her love so overcast. And a sad ditty of this story born from mouth to mouth through all the country past. Still is the burden sung, Oh cruelty, to steal my basil pot away from me. For this episode, uh, a part of me considered doing an entire session on how artists responded to times of plague throughout history. However, that was highly depressing, but I did think that some plague talk was appropriate for the times. The Black Death, or the Black Plague, was the worst pandemic in all known human history, killing hundreds of millions of people throughout Europe and Asia in the 14th century. All because some fleas feasted on infected rats and then transferred that grossness to humans who then gave it to each other. And if you think the current lack of hand sanitizer at Walmart is bad, try living in the Middle Ages, when people threw excrement into the streets from windows. The Black Plague arrived and spread through Italy around 1348, killing approximately half of the population, and in some cases, more. In Florence, for example, the plague killed nearly three-fourths of the population. Three-fourths. That's 75%, y'all. I could be a math teacher someday. There are descriptions of it, and they are horrifying. Imagine, three out of every four people died in agony, covered in boils, attended to by some dudes wearing beak masks who put leeches on them to suck out the plague, which did absolutely nothing. Gross. It was this terrible event that inspired one of the greatest works of Italian literature, literature, of all time, Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, a book that virtually all students of Italian to this day are forced to read. Thank you, Plague. As I hope to demonstrate here though, just because something was written in the 1300s does not mean it has to be boring. If anything, most of the stories in the Decameron are bet shiz insane. The Decameron tells the story of a group of ten young, hot, probably, rich, definitely, Florentine teenagers who flee the city during the Black Plague to go live in a villa in the Tuscan countryside, where they spend their days doing the medieval equivalent of TikTok, telling each other stories. Much in keeping with current standards of living, these hot rich teens hole up in this Tuscan palace for two weeks, while spending two days each week dedicated to chores and prayer, which is two more days than I dedicate to those things currently. These young teens use the other five days a week, ten days total, to tell each other stories. They sit in a circle, and every one of the ten youngsters tells a story. Sometimes themed, sometimes not. And that is precisely how the Decameron gets its name. The word decameron literally means ten days. Decca, Greek for ten, and Hemorah, Greek for days. Oh, there's Gus. Why is he barking? To summarize all of that, a massive, horrifying plague hits Florence in 1348. Boccaccio is inspired to write a book, and that book essentially contains 100 short stories. Are you with me? Cool. Now, for those of you who, like me once upon a time, hear about a book written in 1348 and think, how can that possibly be interesting? I have one thing to say. Au contraire, Monfrere. Yes, some of the stories are stupid and boring, but many of Boccaccio's stories were coup coup for Coco Pov's crazy. Case in point, the story of Lisabetta and the Pot of Basil. In the frame story of the Decameron, this story comes on the fourth day of the rich youth's quarantine. For that day of storytelling, there was a theme: Relationships That End in Disaster. And let me tell you, those crazy kids got very creative with the definition of disaster. Do you think your last relationship ended poorly? Well, just keep listening because you might feel a little better about it. This is my shortened version, and sort of 2020-ified version, of Giovanni Boccaccio's story about Lisabetta and her pot of basil. In the city of Messina, in present-day Sicily, there lives a wealthy family. That family is comprised of three brothers and a sister named Lisabetta, or Isabel. The brothers are merchants who not only travel a lot, but they make a lot of money. And they use that money to hire a young, strapping, hot young employee named Lorenzo. I have no idea how old these two cats are, but it's the 14th century. So for all we know, Lisabetta is probably like 13 and Lorenzo is probably like 65. No, he's probably like 19. I don't know. They're young. And they're both hot. Naturally, when Lise Sabetta sees Lorenzo, she's like, oh damn, who that guy? He's so cute. And Lorenzo sees Lisabetta looking at him and he's like, damn, my employer sister seems like she's into me. Go get it. And they fall in love. You saw that coming from a mile away, didn't ya? Also highly unsurprising is that Lise Sabetta and Lorenzo are young and stupid, and their hormones are out of control. Naturally, they start spending alone time together. Sneaking about, carrying on their love affair in the shadows. But remember, they are young and very stupid, aka bound to get caught, which they do. Lisa Beta's brothers catch on real quick as to what's going on, and they're like, we must stop this immediately. Do they fire Lorenzo? Do they call the police? Do they have a talk with their sister about how she can't shack up with the help because it's the 14th century, and people are very judgy? Mmm. No. They don't do any of those things. Instead, they straight up murder Lorenzo, carry his body into the woods, and bury him. That's I mean, that's one way to solve a problem, I suppose. Though let me note that that was far more socially acceptable in the 14th century than it is today. Murder should be very low on the list when it comes to problem solving. Last on the list. So Lisabetta and Lorenzo are shacking up, the brothers find out, they murder him and bury him in the woods. But Lisabetta doesn't realize that any of this has happened. She wakes up one day and Lorenzo is just gone. Poof, gone. And her murdery brothers are like, yeah, like we don't know what happened to him. He just like left. So maybe you should like get better taste in men. And they go about their business. But Lisabetta can't just go on. She's a teen whose boyfriend just disappeared. She is distraught. The love of her life, Hadi Lorenzo, has vanished. Or has he? Mmm. Intrigue. One night while Lisabetta is sleeping, Ghost Lorenzo comes to her in a dream. And he's all, yo, I'm a ghost because your brothers murdered me and buried me in an unmarked grave in the woods. In his ghost form, he gives her, like basically the treasure map to where she can find his body before he RI paces out. So at this point, Lisa Beta is not only distraught, she's not only haunted, but she is pissed as hell and it's rattled her in the brainium. She is so desperate to see Lorenzo again that she convinces her maid to join her in the search for his body. Now, can you imagine being that maid being stuck with this teenage girl who wants to go dig up a body? And you can't say no because you're a maid. And the maid is like, oh shit, everyone in this house is crazy. You got the murdery brothers, you got the sister who's had a psychological break, and I have to be their maid? The poor maid accompanies Lisabetta in her search for Lorenzo's grave, which they find, because remember, Lisbetta has the treasure map from Ghost Lorenzo. Lisabetta and the maid proceed to dig up Lorenzo's body. Don't worry, it's all totally cool because Boccaccio clarifies that Lorenzo's corpse wasn't putrid or anything, as if that somehow makes this any better. Oh, it was mostly not putrid. That means that it was partially decomposed, dude. Minor decomposition is still decomposition. And believe me, it gets so much worse. After digging up his minorly decomposed body, Lisabetta decides that she wants to take Lorenzo's corpse back to the house. And you best bet that that maid was like, what in the damn hell? But that's all subtext. Then Lisabetta is like, yo, it is too heavy to get this whole body back. Did you bring a knife? No, didn't bring a knife. Don't worry, I brought a backup knife. And she proceeds to cut the head off her dead lover's corpse. Let me repeat that. She cuts the head off of her dead lover's corpse. And I am sure, certain that the maid is now like, what the f This girl is freaking crazy nuts, banana bread, count chocula, cuckoo for freaking cocoa pubs. Sidebar. The thing that I don't understand is that there were two women there. They could have easily brought that whole body back. Which makes it sound like I'm speaking from experience. Hello, I would never admit to murder on a public platform. I'm a lot smarter than that. But plenty of us have had to carry our drunk friends to bed, okay? I went to college at a state school, alright? These things happen. Two women can definitely carry a larger than average dude up a few flights of dorm stairs. The weaker person takes the feet, the stronger person hooks the arms underneath the sweaty armpits, and you proceed very carefully from point A to point B until you can tuck your friend safely into bed. Because that's what friends do. There is no reason that Lisabetta and the maid could not make that happen. It's just not. Was it a storage issue? I don't know. I don't understand any of it. But ultimately, Lisabetta cuts off Lorenzo's not too badly rotted head and carries it back to the house. But what in the hell is she gonna do with the decapitated head of her dead lover? She does the only sensible thing that one could possibly do with the head of one's decapitated lover. Lisabetta gets a big old gardening pot, pops the head into the bottom, and fills it up with soil. She then sprinkles her choice of plant seeds over that soil. In this case, sweet basil, hence the titular, pot of basil. Lisabetta then proceeds to water this pot of basil, not with water from a watering can, like a normal person, which we've already established she is not, but with her tears. That is how much crying she is doing. She is watering a whole damn pot of basil with her tears. Now I personally know very little about plant care, but call me crazy if I think that salt water produced out of your face is not the best watering option. But that's just me. It turns out though that I know nothing, because the decomposing head inside the pot makes for really good nutrient-rich soil, and this pot of basil freaking flourishes. Lorenzo's head, gardening pot, soil, basil seeds, face water, boom, flourishing basil. As we have already established multiple times, Lisabetta is a bit of an odd duck with not the best judgment. Again, she's a teenage girl, I've been there. Did I decapitate the body of my dead lover? No. But I did write Pirates of the Caribbean fanfiction, so we can't all be perfect. Anywho, Lisa Betta is not the best thinker in the world. She's a potter, not a plotter, I suppose you could say. Before she could shrivel up into a raisin from all that crying, her brothers, the captain's obvious, were like, this is weird. We should look into this, we should investigate this. So they sneak into her room the one time that she's not like sobbing over this plant. They nab the pot of basil and they break it open to reveal its contents. Boccaccio isn't too descriptive on what they find, which is almost worse than him actually describing it. There has been a rotting head in this pot of basil for weeks. You don't really need to know any more to know that it was probably super gross. I'm just imagining these brothers breaking it open, finding what's inside, and then all looking at each other like, what the hell? And you know, even though they're the murdery ones, like I want to fully recognize that, they are the murdery ones who made her do this. You know that they never ever wanted to be in a room alone with their sister again. The brothers find out what's in this pot of basil, but they can't just give it back to her. No, no, no, no, no. They can't let her have one thing, okay, one comfort in her horrible little life. No. They take Lorenzo's head and they get rid of it for good. And by God, I hoped they washed their hands after doing it. When Lisabetta discovers what happens, she is even more distraught than she was before. After weeks more of weeping, she straight up dies of a broken heart and, you know, probably a freaking dehydration. She's been crying for months. She probably just shriveled up and blew away like that one lady in. In Game of Thrones. That is the story of Lise Sabetta and her pot of basil, which is absolutely bonkers. Sidebar. I demand that Boz Lerman adapt this into a movie. That would be flamazing. When I was a junior in college, way back in oh my god, 2010, I think. Ugh I'm old. Each student in our early modern Italian literature class had to do a 15-minute presentation on one story from the Decameron. And you best bet that I raised my hand so fast to claim the story of Lisabetta. So fast. And that's because I kind of knew about the story from a different source. Paintings. In a very happy coincidence, this semester that I took that early modern Italian lit class, I also happened to be in a class on 19th century British art. Why, yes, you did hear that right. An art history course on 19th century British art. And believe me, I never expected those two things to overlap, but hey, two birds meet one stone. Huge shout out here to Professor Nancy Rose Marshall because that was one of the best art history classes I have ever taken. We talked about fairy art and uh primordial ooze used in photography and dollhouses in August Gustav Rhinelander and dinosaur parks. It was awesome. In what seems to be a wild leap of logic, 19th century British painters were super, super into Lise Sabetta and her pot of basil. And you are probably thinking, and rightly so, Lindsay, why were all these British guys so obsessed with Boccaccio's Decameron? It was written like 500 years before they were even alive. To which I reply that these British painters were not actually that into Boccaccio's Decameron. Not really, anyway. They just liked this one story in particular about a young girl who chops off her dead lover's head and uses it for fertilizer. Definitely seems odd, you know, but who am I to judge? Okay, I'm doing a podcast about it. I would go so far as to say that these British painters didn't really give a flying fart about Piccadio. Or, you know, to be fair, they probably gave as much of a fart as I did when I was back in college, which is to say that I was conversant in it, but only because I had read the Sparknotes version of every other story except for this one. Eee! 19th century British painters had their own Sparknotes or version of this tale, because it turns out that in 1818, a little British poet by the name of John Keats wrote a poetic adaptation of Lisabetta's story, which she entitled Isabella or The Pot of Basil. It's literally Isabella, semicolon, or comma, the pot of basil. That's that's the whole title. Catchy. Keats's poem is basically the exact same narrative as the one shared above. You heard me reading some of it at the top of the episode. Now I have genuinely no idea why Keats was drawn to this particular story, other than the fact that it's amazing, obviously, but he was. So in 1818, he writes this poem and it gets published. In the late 1840s, a group of young rabble-rousing artists came across the poem and became straight up obsessed with it. These guys are known under the collective name of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. We started with Piccadio, then we got to Basil, and now we are at Brotherhood. A hop skip and a jump across five centuries, several countries, and an ocean. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. What's their deal? I will tell you. Without painting with too broad a brush, and yes, that pun is very much intended, British art has something of a reputation for being boring, bland, straight-laced, and whatever other adjective you'd like to call it. I'm not saying that I agree with that, because as I learned from my course with Nancy Rose Marshall, there were lots of people doing really weird stuff in Britain during the 19th century. But the overarching taste of the early 19th century was for academic art, or art produced that upheld the traditions of the British Royal Academy of Arts, which is just as snooty as it sounds. This organization of the British Royal Academy of Arts more or less ran the art market of the time. Now it didn't literally run the art market, or at least not totally, but the institution largely determined the tastes of the time. There was also a famous Academy of Art in France, with more or less the same deal happening. In addition to teaching the art of painting as the institution believed it was meant to be practiced, the Academy also held exhibitions throughout the year, which were intended to not only promote the work of artists who met academic standards of excellence, but also to sell said art to rich people around town. In England, the be-all end-all of the British Academy was the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, who is primarily known for his portraits, of which he painted many. I'm talking many. So many. All of them good, but pretty boring. He's what you call an academic artist. Think portraits, think battle scenes, think images of historical figures. It was all very prescribed and non-offensive. Thank you very much. But that's more or less what the Academy was all about. It was about maintaining a certain kind of excellence. But as we all know, the same old, same old can quickly become boring. They don't call it old for nothing. In the 1840s, there was a group of young men who bonded over their disdain for the Academy and its monopoly on artistic taste. These young men thought that the art being produced within the realm of the Academy was unimaginative, uninspired, and just generally a huge bore. And you know what? They weren't wrong. But that's just my opinion. The group started out as a trinity, with the artists William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millet, and Dante Gabrielle Rossetti meeting together at Millet's parents' house. At Millet's parents' house, these three artists form a little anti-establishment group of rabble rousers. All three artists, who were around 20 years old, give or take at the time, and coming from middle-class backgrounds, were all in training at the Royal Academy. And who was in charge at the time? None other than Sir Joshua Snoozfest Naptime Reynolds. And these young dudes were over it. If the Academy were a paint color, it'd be beige. Just like the skin of almost all of the Academy's members, if not all of them. Because racism. Hunt, Millet, and Rossetti meet up at Millet's parents' house to do what pretentious young 20-somethings everywhere do. They have philosophical conversations about the current state of things in the art world, where they wished these things would be, and what their purpose as a group was. And their purpose was to shake things up. As the result of these conversations, the three young men come up with a little name for their artists' collective, the Pre-Raphaelite Brethren, also known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. While people who specialize in this period will probably give me the stink eye, I think that the name is great and to the point and quite useful for teaching the basics of this group, because the group's aims are essentially distilled in their chosen name, Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. More or less, the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood determined that everything wrong with the current state of painting could be traced back to the artist Raphael. That's obviously overly simplistic, but it's more or less true. These home fries believed that art needed to return to a style that embraced artistic concepts popular years before Raphael. Y'all know Raphael, he was a contemporary of Michelangelo, known perhaps most widely by his name being used as one of the four Ninja Turtles. To be clear, Raphael is an extraordinarily important figure in the history of art. But as I, Lindsay, recently, and let's be real, quite boldly, declared during a fellowship interview, in 2020, Raphael doesn't cut it. No 18-year-old student wants to learn about Raphael. Because he's boring. He favors relatively simple compositions, idealized faces, clarity. It's all pretty straightforward. And it's boring. As an artist who is largely considered to be one of the top 10 greats of all time, Raphael's influence long outlasted the artist himself, who died in 1520 at the ripe old age of 37. I might get in huge trouble for saying this if anyone with an art history job opening ever listens to it like that's ever gonna happen. But Raphael is more or less the Joshua Reynolds of the Renaissance. The same word keeps coming to mind. Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-baring! Bahring! Bahring! Thus, Hunt, Millet, and Rosetti were very clever in calling themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Their little brotherhood wanted to embrace the tenets of art that predate Raphael. But when you think about it, they named themselves like the most lazy band name in history. Like, what do we call ourselves dude? Dude, how about the pre-Raphaelites? You know, because Raphael is so boring. We get it, you guys, you're edgy. Calm down. While acknowledging that I am grossly oversimplifying things, the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of painters wanted to return to the aesthetic or the visual qualities of the medieval period. They wanted to embrace the artistic concepts that were front and center during that time. That means luminous colors, lots of detail, more complicated compositions, and subject matters that weren't just portraits or history paintings, but rather narrative and moral tales. They were, without question, the hipsters of their time, who, in embracing these new ideas, or rather old ideas of art, were actively rebelling against the lessons that they were being taught at the Royal Academy. Oh, how brave of them, really, just taking on society. The Brotherhood, initially consisting of the trifective Hunt, Malay, and Rossetti, drafted a list of four primary aims for their art. Number one, they were determined to express actual substantial ideas rather than pander to taste or expectation. 2. They vowed to study nature so as to accurately depict it in their artworks. 3. They wanted to tap into what they considered genuine and serious aspects of art rather than those that were simply taught to them. This was not, in other words, art for art's sake. And four, they wanted to make art that wasn't just good, but exceptional. This list is pretty broad, but for a good reason. This was a brotherhood, not a cult. Yeah in a cult call ya dad. Each individual artist within the brotherhood had the room to experiment and do their own things and interpret the brotherhood's tenets in the way that best suited him. There was at once a responsibility to uphold the tenets of the group, while also a responsibility to uphold the freedom of one's own ideas and artistic flair. There was therefore a considerable amount of stylistic difference between each member's art, especially when the group expanded to include other members. In addition to their convictions about what art should look like, the pre-Raphaelites also demonstrated a keen interest in literature, especially romantic literature. And no, I'm not talking about romance in terms of kissy kissy sexy time, but the literary movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Romantic literature often focused on concepts like nature, the idealization of women, complicated emotions, ennui, all of those fun things. The pre-Raphaelites often painted subjects that were either adapted from or parallel to many of those explored within this romantic realm of literature, from alternative retellings of traditional Christian tales to the concept of the quote-unquote fallen woman, to scenes from romantic literature. There were also lots of scenes taken from Arthurian legends, Shakespeare, and even Greek and Roman mythology. Guess who is one of the leading voices in the arena of romantic literature? None other than John Keats, the very author who adapted Boccaccio's story of Lisabetta, Lorenzo, and their ill-fated love affair. Remember, Isabella, semicolon, or Kama, the pot of Basil. As I said earlier, the pre-Raphaelites freaking loved this poem. They loved it. And the fact that it originated with Boccaccio, a 14th-century literary deity, certainly didn't hurt. Boccaccio was, after all, before Raphael. Initially, Millet and Hunt teamed up to produce a series of etchings, or prints, related to Keats's retelling of Boccaccio's story. I honestly don't really know whatever came of that particular project, though it certainly inspired Millet, who was the first of the pre-Raphaelites to take on the subject of Isabella and her pot of basil in a painting. There would be many others of this subject, though Malay's was quite different from all of those. Instead of showing Lisabetta pining over a pot of basil, Millet instead focused on adapting the very start of Keats's poem into painted form. Which goes a little something like this. Fair Isabel, poor simple Isabel, Lorenzo, a young palmer in love's eye. They could not in the selfsame mansion dwell without some stir of heart, some malady. They could not sit at meals but feel how well it soothed each to be the other by. They could not shore beneath the same roof sleep, but to each other dream and nightly weep. Interpreting that particular stanza of Keats's poem, Millet painted a raucous dinner scene in which Lisa Beta and Lorenzo share a quiet moment amidst the broader chaos. It essentially looks like a weirdly modern medieval banquet, as if everyone is cosplaying the Middle Ages very, very well. And the painting itself is beautiful. It shows how the pre-Raphaelites embraced color and costume to create this sense of like a jewel box of people. When you start to look closer, however, you begin to realize just how weird this painting is. First of all, the perspective of the entire composition is skewed, which automatically gives you this sense of foreboding unease. This sense of oddity is made even stronger by the very strange behavior in many of the guests around the table. You've got this one guy just eyeing his wine, this brutish dude in tight white pants who is simultaneously cracking nuts and trying to kick a derpy-looking greyhound, and then you've got Lorenzo, who has fixed Lisa Beta with a truly horrifying creeper gaze as he offers her half an orange. Romance. If one were to look at this painting without knowing its title, they would probably have no idea what story it was referring to. It looks like a really bad dinner party with great outfits. It's very clear that the guy kicking a dog and crushing nuts is probably not the nicest, and that he's mad about the lady across the table accepting half an orange from the creep in red. But that's all pretty on the surface, which is, quite frankly, what this painting embraces most. The most enjoyable thing about it is its vivid colors and its details, which are really fun to pick apart. Millet paints each figure with precision, paying close attention to their dress and accessories. He also painstakingly renders the things on the table and in the margins. One of those details comes in the stool on which Lisa Beta sits. And let me tell you, her outfit is amazing. It's this gorgeous pearly grey dress, it's amazing. But the stool on which she sits clearly bears the letters P R B. Millet didn't sign the painting with his own name. Instead, he signed it with the calling card of his artistic collective, the Brotherhood. This was one of the very first paintings that the Brotherhood exhibited in 1849, just a year after they formed and determined their mission. In that year, Hunt and Millet exhibited works at the Royal Academy, while Rossetti submitted a painting to a nearby exhibition. All three paintings were signed with PRB, which, like no one in London knew what it was. They're like, who is this person? Who is this PRB character? When the establishment found out what was happening, they didn't like it one bit. They weren't about the brotherhood, they weren't about the style in which they painted, they weren't about the attitude. They were not happy. That was made very clear by an excerpt published in the London Times in 1851, which I am going to quote here to a fairly large extent. Quote: We cannot censure at present, as amply or as strongly as we desire to, that strange disorder of the mind or the eyes which continues to rage with unabated absurdity among a class of juvenile artists who style themselves PRB, which being interpreted means pre-Raphael Brethren. Their faith seems to consist of an absolute contempt for perspective and the known laws of light and shade, an aversion to beauty in every shape, seeking out every excess of sharpness and deformity. The Council of the Academy, acting in the spirit of toleration and indulgence to young artists, have now allowed these extravagances to disgrace their walls for the last three years. And though we cannot prevent men who are capable of better things from wasting their talents on ugliness and conceit, the public may fairly require that such offensive jests should not be continued to be exposed as specimens of the waywardness of those artists who have relapsed into the infancy of their profession. End quote. Scathing critique. The funny thing is that now, some 170 years later, the pre-Raphaelites are a highlight of British art, which just goes to show that tastes change. Wouldn't you know it though? That working as an artist's collective is notoriously difficult, and anytime you've got a group of young 20-somethings with big ideas, things are bound to go a bit wonky. By the early 1850s, the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had gotten into a bit of trouble for Malay's painting of Christ in the house of his parents, which is a scene of young Christ in St. Joseph's carpentry shop. Now I'm not going to talk much about that painting, other than to say, by present-day standards, it's fairly non-offensive. But by 19th century standards, people freaking hated it and considered it blasphemy against the Christian faith. After people went nuts about this painting, the members of the Brotherhood slowly but surely disbanded and stopped signing their works as PRB. But just because the Brotherhood was over doesn't mean the artists stopped hanging out or collaborating or, you know, being pre-Raphaelite. One of the things that sure as heck didn't die out was their fascination with Lisa Beta and her freaking pot of basil. John Everett Millet was merely the first one to finish a painting based on Keats' interpretation of Boccaccio, but he sure as heck wasn't the last. Over the course of 50 years, both OG pre-Raphaelite artists and their followers continued to paint scenes inspired by this lurid tale of love, violence, and necrotic herbs. One such individual was none other than William Holman Hunt himself, who in the 1960s began to paint an image of Lisabetta while he was in Florence, the very same plague ridden city from which Piccadio's decameronic youths escaped to go tell stories in the countryside. Hunt's interpretation of Lis Sabetta and her pot of Basil is very different from Malay's precedent in terms of what he chooses to show. But in my opinion, they're very similar in style. At least in the sense that Hunt demonstrates a keen interest in detail, costume, and decor. In Hunt's visual retelling of the story, a dark-haired Lisabetta embraces a flourishing pot of basil that is sitting on top of her prayer bench. Lisabetta's dark hair drapes over the pot in which she planted Lorenzo's head, which is hardly a mystery given that the pot is decorated in skulls. And if you follow one of those skulls down to the fancy quilt on which the pot is sitting, the word Lorenzo is stitched plain as day into the golden fabric. Unlike Malay's painting of the banquet scene, where there really isn't an obvious connection with the big narrative points of Boccaccio's story, as told through Keats, Hunt's depiction of the story is quite clear. There is a girl who has draped herself over a pot of basil covered in skulls, sitting on top of a piece of fabric embroidered with Lorenzo's name, which all leaves very little leeway for any other interpretation of the work. The painting, however, does take on additional connotations, given the circumstances under which Hunt produced it. As I had said, Hunt began painting this image of Lisabeta while he was in Florence in 1866, where he had traveled with his new wife, Fanny, who was pregnant. Late that year, Fanny died from complications during her childbirth, understandably leaving Hunt devastated. When Hunt returned to the canvas later that year, he decided to memorialize Fanny in the figure of Lisabetta, and he ended up working on the canvas consistently over the course of another year before he finished it in 1868, after which it was purchased by a very wealthy and prominent art dealer in London. It was this depiction of Lisabetta that would have the most influence on later painters who followed in Hunt's footsteps. One of the more famous iterations of this scene is one by John White Alexander, which is now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. The painting, which dates to 1897, shows Lisabetta in a billowing white black gown occupying an obscure space with this massive earthenware pot, which she caresses with her hand as she rubs her cheek against it. But unlike pre-Raphaelite precedents, Alexander's interpretation is stark and gloomy, evoking the feeling of Lisabetta visiting a tomb. Which, in a way, she is. In other words, the focus is no longer on the details so much as the overall melancholic atmosphere of the scene. Other artists who tackled the scene were far more loyal to the pre-Raphaelite penchant for details and costume than Alexander was. Even though it dates to the early 20th century, more than 50 years removed from Malay's first go at the scene, John William Waterhouse's 1907 painting is far more pre-Raphaelite-esque than Alexander's. Waterhouse paints Lisabetta kneeling in a garden, embracing her big old pot of basil. Once again, the very conspicuous placement of a skull upon a plinth upon which the basil sits is a dead, get it, dead, dead giveaway as to the contents of the pot, other than, you know, the thriving basil sprouting from it. To be clear, John William Waterhouse was not a pre-raphiolite, or at least he wasn't part of the Brotherhood, which had disbanded a half century before he painted this painting. But he certainly worked in their style, as evidenced by Lise Sabetta's dreamy costume and the medieval feel of the whole thing. If any of you listening can think of Mier's Mier, I keep saying Mier, now, can think of Millet's famous painting of Ophelia floating in water. This version of Lise Sabetta by Waterhouse has a similar feel to it. Other versions of Lise Sabetta and her pot of basil were painted by Arthur Trevithan Noel, Edward Reginald Frampton, George Henry Grenville Manton, as well as a beautiful lithograph by Avril Burley, which accompanied an early 20th century edition of John Keats' poetry. The question remains: what drew all of these artists to this oddball story about a young girl who uses the head of her murdered lover to sew some incredible basil? It's a melancholic tale set in the medieval period, rife with melancholy, titillating visuals, and lost love. For the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Boccaccio's story, as filtered down to them by Keats, was everything they wanted from a subject. It allowed them to express their new artistic ideals of jewel-tone colors and sumptuous details. It allowed them to tell interesting stories with their brushes. It allowed them to engage in the yearnings of the human spirit and the grief of lost love. After all, nothing lasts forever. The quirky story of Lisa Beta and her pot of basil, however, has outlasted most. It outlasted the plague that inspired it, the literary giants who wrote about it, and even the artists who gave it new contours in paint and color. I can't help but think that maybe the youths in Boccaccio's Decameron had it right. Stories, even the weird ones, maybe especially the weird ones, are what get us through hard times. I hope that you enjoyed this one. That is all I have for you today on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Boccaccio and Basil. Just a little bit of everything. I will post all relevant images and links for your perusal to the podcast's website, SteffAboutThingspodcast.com. For this episode, I used a smattering of sources, whatever I could really get my hands on online. But since I already knew a lot of this material having done a presentation on it even 10 years ago, I don't really have a book or a person in particular to shout out, but I will still post links and sources to the podcast website. If you are so inclined, you can contact me either through the website, again, stuffaboutthingspodcast.com, or at the podcast's email, which is stuffaboutthingspodcast at gmail.com. I've been hearing from quite a few of you lately, which is awesome. I really enjoy and appreciate anyone who takes the time to reach out, and I love hearing about how you have been binge listening to the podcast while cleaning or working around the house or on long car journeys. It's just super cool to hear. Several of you have even checked in to ensure that another episode was coming, which put a bit of a fire under my butt to sit down and record this thing. So thank you for that. I am just a person with a microphone who wants to share her love of arts and maybe even to make you smile and laugh a little bit, even when the jokes are bad. So when I get those emails and messages, it means a lot. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And to the person who's submitted my 18th iTunes review, thank you, good sir or lady. Thank you so much. If you have yet to rate and review the podcast, I would appreciate that as well. It only takes three seconds to hit those stars and just a few minutes more to write a review. And it makes my whole day when I see new ones come in. As for Gus Corner this episode, you guys, Gus turned seven this week. Yes, he turned seven on April 22nd, and we pampered him all day long, even more than usual. He got two frosty paws, which is a type of dog safe ice cream, and he got lots and lots and lots and lots of love and attention. He is happy and healthy, and I am cheersing to seven more full years with a canine love of my life. As for me, my university has now gone completely online, just like almost every other aspect of life, which has been a huge adjustment. I'm also working, or at least trying to work, from my parents' house in Wisconsin, and preparing to move out of my apartment in St. Louis in the coming weeks, which is a very sad thing to consider, especially because I will no longer have access to my university's amazing library system, or at least not, you know, the physical books. In the meantime, I will make do with remote resources and do my best to make sure that you continue to get episodes that are as thoroughly researched as time and resources permit. I think I've got an idea for the next couple, as well as some other exciting things in the pipeline, so stay tuned. The usual links go out to the providers of the royalty free music that you've heard over the course of this episode, including hooksounds.com, freemusicarchive.org, and a new site that I recently used called freestockmusic.com. The first tune that you hear is a version of Box Brandenburg Concerto number four by Kevin McLeod. The second Jantier tune is called Success Dreams, and the music that accompanies my reading of Keats is by Alexander Nakarata. Nakarata? Alexander, I'm very sorry for mispronouncing your name. But it is called Dramatic Interlude. Thank you to those sources for the free music. That is all for me today. I hope that you enjoyed this episode, and more than anything, I hope that you and your loved ones are all safe, happy, healthy, and practicing that social distancing. It's very important. And no matter where you are, no matter who you're with, I want you to take the time to look at something beautiful today. As for me, I'ma go eat some basil. A la próxima.