Rossetti's Helen of Troy.
Snobs and populists usually make war over contemporary culture. It's rare to find the same elitists who object to, say, the listening posts beside famous works of art at Tate Modern that allow you to hear what some industrial noise merchant thinks of Mark Rothko - to take my own latest gripe - complain about the popular art of the past. History gives everything a patina. Yet there is one art of the past that divides people on elitist and populist lines as bitterly today as when it was new. Tate Britain's announcement of yet another pre-Raphaelite exhibition once again reminds us this Victorian Brotherhood will never go away.
Few dead white male artists are as popular as Rossetti and co, despite a near total condemnation by modern critics. Even a senior curator at Tate Britain recently expressed to me his dislike of these artists - but what can Tate Britain do? As he said, if they don't show the pre-Raphaelites they get complaints from "teenage girls".
Well, I've decided to take my name off the petition calling for the pre-Raphaelites to be erased from history. After all, what was their crime? Not to be Manet. And yet just because their version of the avant-garde turned out to have little to do with the future of art doesn't mean these idealistic painters were without merit.
They were very literary artists, in a literary nation. They told stories that moved and seduced their public - and still do. In the end, liking a picture because it reminds you of the imaginative worlds of Tennyson, Dante, Keats and Shakespeare - to take some authors the pre-Raphaelites illustrated - is commendable. There are far worse reasons to like art than because it feeds a passion for literature. It is not even true that modern art owes nothing to the pre-Raphaelites. Their fascination with poetry, romance and dream came into its own in the late 19th century when the Symbolists emulated, and deepened, their sensuality. There is a line from Burne-Jones to Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon.
This is why the pre-Raphaelites are famous all over the world, not just in Britain. We can't escape them, and we shouldn't deny them. They epitomise the worst of British art - and the best.
