The Shadow is based on the Greek myth of Debutades, a Corinthian girl who drew the portrait of her beloved on the wall of her bed-chamber by tracing the outline of his shadowcast by the lamp-light on the night before he departed for war. Leighton changed the setting for the drama to the battlements of a medieval castle, below which the young crusader’s ships are waiting.
ThePre-Raphaelite Brotherhood founded in 1848 by seven young artists who banded together against what they felt was an artificial and mannered approach to painting taught at London’s Royal Academy of Arts. Inspired by the theories of John Ruskin, who urged artists to ‘go to nature’, they believed in an art of serious subjects treated with maximum realism. Their principal themes were initially religious, but their later works largely focus on medieval subjects from literature and poetry privileging atmosphere and mood over narrative. Althought disolved in the 1850s, the movement gain a lot of attention and many followers continued to paint in their style. - Mysterious Art Century Instagram-Facebook-Twitter-Pinterest-Shop
