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A woman with copper hair stares past you, her lips parted, a pomegranate split open in her lap. She is not a portrait. She is a code. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painted symbols the way medieval scribes illuminated manuscripts: every stem, every jewel, every turned shoulder carried a meaning that their Victorian audience read fluently. Pre-Raphaelite symbolism is a visual language drawn from medieval allegory, Arthurian legend, botanical folklore, and occult revivalism, where a single flower could signal chastity or seduction and a woman’s unbound hair marked her as either a virgin or a witch.

What Was the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood?

What Was the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

The movement began in 1848 when three young English painters—John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Holman Hunt—formed a secret society they called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. They rejected the academic conventions of the Royal Academy, which they believed had corrupted painting since Raphael. Their solution was to return to the earnest, symbol-dense style of early Renaissance art before Raphael: flat compositions, bright colors, and every object loaded with meaning. What they created was not merely a painting style. It was a symbolic system that drew from medieval bestiaries, theosophy, Arthurian romance, and the occult revival that was reshaping Victorian England. For a broader look at how visual motifs carry esoteric weight across periods, see our guide to occult iconography in art.

Why Did the Pre-Raphaelites Use So Much Symbolism?

Why Did the Pre-Raphaelites Use So Much Symbolism

The Pre-Raphaelites used so much symbolism because they believed the painting should carry the meaning as well as the beauty. The movement began in 1848 when three young English painters — Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt — formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and their art drew on the medieval and the literary sources, the poetry and the legend. They also had a practical reason: the Royal Academy taught the conventional subjects and the conventional style, and the Brotherhood rejected the formula in favor of the intense color, the detailed realism, and the symbolic depth. The symbolism was the vehicle of the meaning: the flower, the color, the gesture, each carrying the message of the painting.

Why Did the Pre-Raphaelites Use Symbolism?

The short answer: they believed the visible world was a veil for the invisible one. The longer answer involves a specific historical collision.

The Brotherhood formed in the same year that the Spiritualist movement reached England. The Fox sisters had begun their spirit communications in New York in 1848, and by 1852, séances were being held in London drawing rooms. Rossetti attended them. His sister Christina wrote poems about the dead speaking through tables. The Pre-Raphaelites were not a religious movement, but they were a spiritual one. They believed that material objects carried moral and metaphysical weight.

This was not a new idea. Medieval painters had used the same logic: a lily in an Annunciation scene meant the Virgin’s purity; a closed garden meant her virginity; a unicorn resting in that garden meant the Incarnation. The Pre-Raphaelites revived this system but replaced its Christian theology with a broader symbolic vocabulary drawn from Romantic poetry, Arthurian legend, and the occult traditions they were rediscovering.

They also had a practical reason. The Royal Academy taught that history painting was the highest form of art. The Pre-Raphaelites could not compete with the Academy’s grand historical machines. Instead, they packed their smaller canvases with dense symbolic detail that rewarded close reading. A viewer who understood the symbols felt initiated into a secret knowledge. That was the point.

What Did the Flowers Mean? The Botanical Code

The flowers of the Pre-Raphaelite paintings carried a botanical code drawn from the language of the flowers. The lily meant the purity and the virginity; the rose meant the love and the beauty; the poppy meant the sleep and the death; the marigold meant the grief; the daisy meant the innocence. The code was known to the Victorian audience, and the paintings were read like the letters: the flower in the hand, the wreath on the head, the blossom fallen at the feet — each a sentence in the language of the flowers. The Pre-Raphaelites painted the flowers with the botanical precision, and the precision served the code: the correct flower, the correct meaning, the correct message.

Pre-Raphaelite Flower Symbolism, Explained

The Pre-Raphaelites painted flowers with the precision of botanical illustrators, but they chose each species for its symbolic value. This was the Victorian language of flowers, a system codified in dozens of popular dictionaries published between 1820 and 1860. The most influential was Charlotte de Latour’s Le Langage des Fleurs (1819), translated into English in 1834.

Rossetti’s Proserpine (1874) shows the goddess of the underworld holding a pomegranate, its seeds spilling. The fruit is not decoration. It is the reason she cannot leave Hades. In the same painting, ivy climbs the wall behind her. In the language of flowers, ivy meant fidelity and marriage. Proserpine was married to death.

Millais’s Ophelia (1851-1852) is the most famous example of Pre-Raphaelite botanical symbolism. Every flower in the painting corresponds to a line from Shakespeare’s play. The weeping willow over Ophelia’s head means forsaken love. The nettles growing beside it mean pain. The daisies near her hand mean innocence. The poppy floating past means death. Millais painted each species from life, spending five months on the riverbank at Ewell in Surrey. He painted the flowers first, then the figure of Ophelia. The plants were not background. They were the text.

Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat (1854-1856) uses a different botanical logic. The goat stands on the salt-encrusted shore of the Dead Sea. The plants around it are dead or dying. Hunt painted this on location near Sodom, and the desiccated vegetation is not symbolic in the floral-dictionary sense. It is literal evidence of a cursed landscape. The goat itself is the scapegoat from Leviticus 16, carrying the sins of Israel into the wilderness. The dead plants confirm that this is a place God has abandoned.

What Do the Women in Pre-Raphaelite Paintings Symbolize?

Pre-Raphaelite women are not portraits of individuals. They are types, and the types are coded.

The red-haired woman appears constantly: Rossetti’s Jane Morris, Burne-Jones’s Maria Zambaco, Waterhouse’s models for his nymphs and sorceresses. Red hair in Victorian England carried associations with witchcraft, Jewishness, and sexual deviance. The Pre-Raphaelites reversed this. They made red hair the mark of the supernatural woman: the enchantress, the prophetess, the woman who exists outside Victorian domesticity. Rossetti’s Lady Lilith (1866-1868) shows a red-haired woman combing her hair before a mirror. Lilith was Adam’s first wife in Jewish folklore, the one who refused to submit and became a demon. Rossetti wrote a sonnet for the painting: “The rose and poppy are her flowers; for where / Is he not found, O Lilith, whom shed scent / And soft-shed kisses and soft sleep shall snare?” The poppy means sleep and death. Lilith is a trap.

The unbound hair is itself a symbol. In Victorian society, a woman wore her hair up in public. Loose hair meant she was either a child, a prostitute, or a madwoman. Pre-Raphaelite painters gave their subjects loose hair constantly. Millais’s Ophelia floats with her hair spread on the water. Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott (1888) shows her hair tangled with the threads of her loom. The Lady of Shalott is cursed to weave without looking at the world. When she looks, she dies. Her unbound hair marks her as outside society, outside the rules, outside life itself.

The woman in armor appears in the Arthurian paintings. Burne-Jones’s The Beguiling of Merlin (1872-1877) shows Nimue, the Lady of the Lake, reading a spell from a book while Merlin sleeps beside her. She wears armor. She is not a passive maiden. She is the active agent, the one who binds the magician. The armor means power. The book means occult knowledge. The sleeping Merlin means the old order yielding to the new.

Were the Pre-Raphaelites Involved in the Occult?

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a secret society. They had an initiation, a list of members known only to each other, and a journal called The Germ (1850) that published their manifestos. They signed their paintings with the initials PRB, which the public initially misread as “Please Ring Bell.” When the meaning was discovered, the press attacked them as a secret cabal.

Rossetti’s involvement with spiritualism deepened after the death of his wife Elizabeth Siddal in 1862. Siddal had been his model, his muse, and his student. She died of a laudanum overdose, possibly suicide. Rossetti buried a manuscript of his poems with her. Seven years later, he had her exhumed to retrieve the poems. The exhumation was conducted at night by torchlight. Rossetti claimed that Siddal’s spirit had told him to retrieve the poems. He published them in 1870.

This is not a footnote. It is central to understanding Rossetti’s late work. His paintings of women after 1862 are increasingly spectral. The Blessed Damozel (1871-1878) shows a woman leaning out from heaven, her body elongated and unearthly. The painting is based on Rossetti’s own poem, written when he was nineteen, about a woman who dies and waits in heaven for her lover. After Siddal’s death, the poem and the painting became a personal occult document: a communication with the dead.

How Did Pre-Raphaelite Symbolism Influence the Occult Revival?

The occult revival of the late nineteenth century drew heavily on Pre-Raphaelite imagery. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in 1888, used Pre-Raphaelite paintings as visual aids for meditation. The poet W.B. Yeats, who was a Golden Dawn initiate, wrote that Rossetti’s women were “images of the soul.” The Pre-Raphaelites had created a visual vocabulary that the occultists could borrow: the woman as sibyl, the flower as talisman, the medieval setting as a gateway to a pre-rational world. For more on how these figures connect to magical traditions, see our glossary entry on Lilith in occult history.

The Pre-Raphaelite system is not a closed symbolic language like alchemy or Kabbalah. It is an eclectic system that borrows freely.

From medieval bestiaries: The unicorn appears in Burne-Jones’s tapestries and in the background of several Annunciation scenes. In medieval tradition, the unicorn could only be captured by a virgin. The Pre-Raphaelites used this to mean spiritual purity, but also to mean the impossibility of capturing the divine.

From Arthurian romance: The Holy Grail appears in Burne-Jones’s The Sleep of Arthur in Avalon (1881-1898) and in the stained glass windows he designed for the chapel at the Birmingham Museum. The Grail in Pre-Raphaelite painting is not a cup. It is a symbol of hidden knowledge, the thing that can only be found by the pure of heart.

From theosophy: The Pre-Raphaelites did not read Blavatsky directly, but they absorbed the theosophical idea that ancient wisdom had been preserved in symbols. Rossetti’s Astarte Syriaca (1877) shows the Syrian goddess with a crescent moon at her feet and a halo of stars. This is not Christian iconography. It is theosophical: the goddess as the cosmic feminine principle.

What is missing: The Pre-Raphaelites did not use alchemical symbols directly. They did not paint the philosopher’s stone or the green lion. But they painted women who transform, flowers that mean death, and landscapes that are moral arguments. The alchemical logic is there, but it is buried under the medieval surface.

Common Misconceptions About Pre-Raphaelite Symbolism

Misconception 1: The women are just Victorian pin-ups. This is the most common dismissal. The women are not decorative. They are theologically and symbolically loaded. A Rossetti woman is not meant to be desired. She is meant to be read.

Misconception 2: The flowers are just pretty. They are not. Millais spent months painting the flowers in Ophelia because each one was a line of text. The painting is a poem written in petals.

Misconception 3: The symbolism is arbitrary. It is not. The Pre-Raphaelites used established symbolic systems: the language of flowers, medieval bestiaries, Arthurian romance, and Christian iconography. A Victorian viewer would have recognized most of the symbols. We have lost that fluency, but it was once common knowledge.

Misconception 4: The Pre-Raphaelites were anti-modern. They were not. They were reacting against the Royal Academy, but they were deeply engaged with the intellectual currents of their time: spiritualism, the occult revival, the Oxford Movement, and the Gothic Revival in architecture. They were not retreating into the past. They were building a new visual language for a world that had lost its old one.

FAQ

What is the most symbolically dense Pre-Raphaelite painting? Millais’s Ophelia (1851-1852) contains over twenty identifiable plant species, each with a specific symbolic meaning drawn from Shakespeare’s text and the Victorian language of flowers.

Did the Pre-Raphaelites actually practice occultism? Rossetti attended séances and believed he communicated with his dead wife. Other members were not directly involved in occult societies, but their work was later adopted by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

What does the pomegranate mean in Pre-Raphaelite art? The pomegranate means captivity in the underworld, marriage, and the inability to return to innocence. It appears most famously in Rossetti’s Proserpine (1874).

The Pre-Raphaelite symbolic system is not a dead language. It is a code that the occult revival of the late nineteenth century inherited and transformed. When you look at a Pre-Raphaelite painting, you are looking at a document of Victorian spiritual anxiety: the fear that the material world is all there is, and the hope that it is not. The flowers, the women, the colors, and the jewels are evidence of that hope. They are not decoration. They are prayer.

For a deeper look at how visual symbolism carries esoteric meaning, see our guide to occult iconography in art. The Pre-Raphaelites were not the first to use this method, but they were among the last to assume their audience would understand it. We are still learning to read what they wrote.