The Pre-Raphaelite movement that emerged in the mid 19th century was a band of highly detailed, allegorical painters, who wanted to tell stories with with their work. However, this wasn't the only thing that they did.
Pre-Raphaelite painters were poets, writers, and artists. They were
influenced by medieval religious art and by the Renaissance. They used complex visual language, borrowed from the visual arts of Europe and the Renaissance.
Their creative outputs were a mixture of their writings and the sometimes less than virtuous instalment of a female muse as being the pinnacle of all things beautiful as the centre point of their work.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was no exception to this, as he wrote in his poem, The Blessed Domzel, of which you can find an amazing breakdown over on a website called Poem Analysis
In the final stanza of this text:
... But soon their path
Was vague in distant spheres:
And then she cast her arms along
The golden barriers,
And laid her face between her hands,
And wept. (I heard her tears.)
I chose to give MidJourney the prompt
their path was vague through distant spheres
With no other pretext or context. The other portions of the poem talk of lovers stranded by great distances, with the notion suggested that they may not even be on the same planet (in terms of a literal, or metaphorical interpretation)
This is what MidJourney though about all of that
I liked two of these examples. You can guess which one I liked the most, as per the first image you saw in this post. Still, this is interest, as even with no prompt, the painting style is similar to that of the Pre-Raphaelite style. Incredible stuff:
But of course, as a AI-creator-curator, the image I ultimately chose as the "completed" work, with no further iteration required is the following one:
It is a little more abstract, and the fact that the path separates the two figures represented, with spherical clouds, and the hint of a shooting star in the distance brings so much meaning, using a single line from a really long, complex, and beautiful poem.
I would be lying to say I am not in awe of the way in which a generative piece of machine can extrapolate such meaning from a single sentence.
Truly chilling stuff. I am keen to see what other abstract representations of phrases I can coax from the machine.
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