This was the mood of the young artists who united to form the pre-Raphaelite group of 1848. They were students at the Royal Academy of from twenty to four-and-twenty years of age. The first of the group, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, had already written some of his poems. The second, Holman Hunt, had still a difficulty in overcoming the opposition of his father, who was not pleased to see him giving up a commercial career. John Everett Millais, the youngest, had made most progress as a painter, and was one of the best pupils at the Academy. But they were contented neither by the artistic achievement of their teachers nor by the method of instruction. Etty, the most valued of them all, according to the account of Holman Hunt, painted mythological pictures, full of empty affectation; Mulready drew in a diluted fashion, and sacrificed everything to elegance; Maclise had fallen into patriotic banalities; Dyce had stopped short in his course and begun again when it was too late. Thus they had of necessity to provide their own training for themselves. All three worked in the same studio; and it so happened that one day--in 1847 or 1848--chance threw into their hands some engravings of Benozzo Gozzoli's Campo-Santo frescoes in Pisa. Nature and truth--everything which they had dimly surmised, and had missed in the productions of English art--here they were. Overcome with admiration for the sparkling life, the intensity of feeling, and the vigorous form of these works, which did not even shrink from the consequences of ugliness, they were agreed in recognising that art had always stood on the basis of nature until the end of the fifteenth century, or, more exactly, until the year 1508, when Raphael left Florence to paint in the Vatican in Rome. Since then everything had gone wrong; art had stripped off the simple garment of natural truthfulness and fallen into conventional phrases, which in the course of centuries had become more and more empty and repellent by vapid repetition. Was it necessary that the persons in pictures should, to the end of the world, stand and move just as they had done a thousand times in the works of the Cinquecentisti? Was it necessary that human emotions--love, boldness, remorse, and renunciation--should always be expressed by the same turn of the head, the same lift of the eyebrows, the same gesture of the arms, and the same folded hands, which came into vogue through the Cinquecentisti? Where in nature are the rounded forms which Raphael, the first Classicist, borrowed from the antique? And in the critical moments of life do people really form themselves into such carefully balanced groups, with the one who chances to have on the finest clothes in the centre?