Raising of Lazarus, after Giotto

While in Italy, the Pre-Raphaelite painter, art dealer, and collector Charles Fairfax Murray continuously drew and painted after the works of early Italian masters, often working as a copyist for John Ruskin. Fairfax Murray's watercolor of the Raising of Lazarus, drawn after Giotto's composition in the fresco cycle in the Arena Chapel in Padua, shows his profound interest in the works of the major Italian painters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In creating this work, Fairfax Murray placed himself in a generations-long line of painters who learned and perfected their craft by emulating and copying the masters before them. This interest in reviving the arts of the past is characteristic of the Pre-Raphaelites, who celebrated and adopted the style and subjects of late Medieval and early Renaissance art.