The title indicates their aim, which was to draw the inspiration of their art from the fifteenth-century painters of Italy.

The sweetness of feeling in a picture such as Botticelli's 'Nativity,' the delicacy of workmanship and beautiful painting of detail in Antonello's 'St.
Jerome' and other pictures of that date, had an irresistible fascination for them.

They fancied and felt that these artists had attained to the highest of which art was capable, so that the best could only again be produced by a faithful study of their methods.
The aims of the Brotherhood were not imitation of the artists but of the methods of the past.

They held that every painted object, and every painted figure should be as true as it could be made to the object as it actually existed, rather than to the effect produced upon the eye, seeing it in conjunction with other objects.
These men heralded a widespread medieval revival, but all the study in the world could not make them paint like born artists of the fifteenth century.

Yet there are those who think that much of the spirit of beauty, which had dwelt in the soul of Botticelli and his contemporaries, was born again in Rossetti and Burne-Jones.