In 1848—a year of political revolution across Europe—seven young Englishmen formed an artistic alliance aspiring to rebel against the contemporary Victorian art world.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, defied idealized figures popularized by Raphael and other High Renaissance artists to reflect the simplicity, spirituality, and beauty they found in late medieval and early Renaissance art. Truth and Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelites and the Old Masters is the first major exhibition to juxtapose examples by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with works that inspired its members, including Italian old masters Fra Angelico and Pietro Perugino and their Northern contemporaries Jan van Eyck and Hans Memling.

It reveals how the Brotherhood’s aesthetic evolved over time to embrace artistic influences from the High and late Renaissance, such as Botticelli, Raphael, Titian, and Veronese. It also offers a rich multimedia opportunity to examine the artists’ attraction to stained glass, domestic decorations, and sixteenth-century textiles.