As we shiver through this bitter winter a favorite carol I listened to again over Christmas keeps playing through my head:
In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.
When I first heard the haunting melody and read the lyrics decades ago I thought it was a medieval carol. It seemed to share a sensibility with three of my favorites, The Coventry Carol, There is No Rose, and the Corpus Christi Carol. But no, it is a poem by the Victorian poet Christina Rossetti set to music by Gustav Holst. But perhaps I did pick up some medieval vibes for Christina was the sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the leading medievalist of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. This group of artists were dedicated to returning painting to the era before Raphael. They believed that the spiritual and creative integrity of medieval art had been lost. They particularly despised Sir Joshua Reynolds, founder of the Royal Academy of Arts, nicknaming him Sir Sloshua, sloshy being their term for inauthentic and conventional art. (So similar to the modern word slop for poor quality AI images). Many of Dante Gabriel’s paintings, like the one below, contain medieval iconography and characters in richly detailed medieval dress. The scene glimpsed through the window echoes similar scenes in Renaissance paintings.
Dispatches From the Former New World 