The development of these revivals in Europe may be understood partly as an expression of nationalistic feeling, for it represented a nostalgic return to long-forgotten or neglected forms of art. In Germany and England, the Gothic tradition constituted a continuation rather than a revival, with artists showing a greater understanding of the historical weight of the style and reworking it from a romantic point of view. In contrast to the Neoclassicism that had had such a profound effect on art, the Neo-Rococo style was reintroduced by the Goncourt brothers (who wrote The Art of the 18th Century, 1859—65) and practised by painters such as Tassaert and Roqueplan. The French Renaissance architectural style of the Loire chateaux was re-adopted, as was the Henry II furniture style. In 1850, Leon de Laborde (1807-69), an aristocratic historian, politician, explorer, Louvre curator, and amateur photographer, proclaimed his nationalistic vision of the French Renaissance in his Renaissance of the Arts at the French Court.
It was a time of rationalism and enlightenment, and, in England, the Industrial Revolution, antiquity, the Christian Middle Ages, and the Renaissance all came to be regarded as golden ages of the past that could be looked back upon as Utopian examples. Rushing to the rescue of art - a victim of the degeneration and corruption of its time -were artistic brotherhoods such as the French Primitives, the German Nazarenes, the Italian Purists, and the English Pre-Raphaelites, who all harked back to former traditions in order to give true meaning to their work.
