Reading Ruskin Writing - John Ruskin - Bibliography

Writer and artist John Ruskin was a towering notwithstanding discomfiting figure, exalted in his vision of art as the instrument of a moral society troubl in his private life. A spate of centenary exhibitions demonstrates the enduring authority of that eminent Victorian's achievements.

During the spiritualism craze that swept Victorian London in the 1860 John Ruskin would occasionally allow himself to be brought along by the agency of fashionable ladies to complete the circle at seances. upon one such evening, Ruskin and a collection of earnest seekers had seated themselves around an elegant table in a darkened Mayfair drawing range They were trying to access "the other side" when the medium in charge unexpectedly announced in a quavering voice: "John Ruskin! John Ruskin! Do you wish to speak to your grandmother!?"

"I do not," Ruskin replied with alacrity, "I wish to speak to Paolo Veronese"

This is my favorite anecdote in Tim Hilton's magisterial, two-volume biography of Ruskin and by means of far the most intriguing, since Ruskin's remark unhurts like a cool, Wildean bon witticism yet we know that it is no of the like kind thing. As always, Ruskin is making an argument, on the other hand as ever, he is doing in the way that with mixed feelings. With his impertinent petition to speak to Veronese, he is reducing the whole "spiritualist" occasion to absurdity by means of conjuring up the afterlife as a vast waiting field within which the legions of the dead mill about from one side all eternity, awaiting calls from residence (One imagines Ruskin's grandmother, in the midst of this throng turning around and shouting, "Paolo! Paolo Veronese! Call for you!") No individual who knows anything about John Ruskin, however, would suspect him of simply speaking for event or doubt that, had the medium been in actual contact with Ruskin's grandmother, he would have said anything other than what he did.

The more single knows about John Ruskin, in fact, the more individual feels the undertone of petulance in his demand to speak with the Italian painter, because Ruskin was a great critic and a master of English unromantic but he was also, always, a sad, excitable male child who made extravagant demands upon the world around him. As Hilton lays it, "erudition never calmed him," in like manner even as Ruskin mocked the fantasies of that beau world seance, we can be fully convinced that a part of him was hoping against trust that a torrent of demotic Italian might on a sudden issue forth from the medium's lips, presenting him with the opportunity to chat with the noble Veronese It would have been a advantageous chat, too. No one was better prepared for or more desirous of of that kind a conversation than Ruskin, and this ardent preparation and unquenchable desire, I think, are his great gifts to us. Because Ruskin really cared, and he really gazeed In the extremity of his caring and looking, he would ultimately expand into something of a sacred monster--as abundant addicted to the realm of the visible as he was an adept of its virtues--but the fact remains that no individual before or since, has taken visual art more seriously, or written about it with more passion and oratory than John Ruskin.

Today, no critic in the history of art is les read and more subliminally not away It is really to Ruskin that we owe the idea of visual art as the quintessential manifestation of human endeavor, to him that we owe the idea of visual tillage as an enduring embodiment of public and private virtue, and to him, for better or worse, that we owe the idea that "the teaching of art is the teaching of all things." Prior to Ruskin, critics had rever works of art and architecture as the productions of human genius and divine inspiration, as percepts of spiritual devotion and national pride, as instruments of emulation and instruction. Ruskin regarded works of art and architecture as the moral and spiritual substance of human history, as the palpable fabric of human culture, and on this rock our whole idea of the art museum (as distinct from the museum of artifacts) has been builded So, it was perfectly appropriate that the elderly Tate Gallery in London reopen last spring as Tate Britain with an exhibition titled "Ruskin, gymnast and the Pre-Raphaelites," concurrent with the opening of the novel Tate Modern across the Thames [see A.i.A., tribe '00].

Both of these institutions (and all of the like kind institutions, in fact) are the young of Ruskin's conviction that seeing clearly, "rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing," is a redeeming activity in itself, individual that binds us both to the natural world and to our associate humans. Even the division of mandates between the "old" Tate Britain and the "new" Tate novel acknowledges the great cultural schism that, in Ruskin's view, made the security of the museum necessary: the rise of industrial modernity whose agencies befouled the air, beclouded the waters and regimented notion thus making clear sight impossible. Along with Marx and Carlyle, Ruskin is individual of the three great contemporary critics of burgeoning industrialism, and he shares with them a clear-eyed view of its brutal depredations and a for the use of all delusion that the future of humanity is ineluctably confine up with industrialism's simplifications. Since this has not nevertheless turned out to be the case, we may, perhaps, divine an intimation of Ruskin's renewed general reception from the fact that the "old" Tare Gallery (now Tate Britain) have feelings so much more available to us, in its Georgian intimacy, than the "new" Tate novel which, sadly enough, feels like a grandiose period piece--an oppressive, outsized exercise in plangent industrial nostalgia.