I didn’t think that I liked John Ruskin much when I first encountered him. This would have been a little over thirty years ago, when I was a high school student (around 16 years of age) who had become recently interested in the history of modern art. Although I would later take courses in art and the humanities, my education in art history began as a largely autodidactic process as I pored through whichever books were available at the local library (“local” being northern Florida during the late 1980s). I realize in retrospect that many of these sources (many published in the mid-twentieth century) expressed profoundly anti-Victorian or pro-modernist sentiments, but at the time, my skills of critical analysis were yet to be fully-honed.
Thus, I learned about—or came to accept—the Romantic concept of the individual artist’s heroic struggle against conformity and social conventions. As a teenager dissatisfied with the society that surrounded him, this narrative appealed strongly to me. I had already become interested in the early twentieth-century Surrealists, whose explorations of the irrational worlds of dreams and fantasy provided me with an alternative to the products of 1980s culture. I began learning more about the precursors to Surrealism, which led me to the broader Romantic tradition within nineteenth-century art, ranging from Francisco Goya to Gustave Moreau. Along the way, I became fascinated with the British Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetic Movement, and thereby added such exotic (to me) names as “Dante Gabriel Rossetti” and “Edward Coley Burne-Jones” to my canon of rebellious, avant-garde artists.
For an avant-garde narrative to function, there needs to be an opposition against which the artists will struggle. However, in modernist versions of the nineteenth century, Ruskin’s position is a complicated one, and it makes it difficult to categorize him as an ally to the avant-garde or as one of its foes. Admittedly, some authors have focused on Ruskin’s earlier role as a defender of artists like Turner and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and thus cast him as an antagonist to the establishment. But most of the accounts that I came across depicted Ruskin as the villain—a philistine, even, who so viciously attacked the radical “Nocturne” paintings of Whistler that he provoked the artist (justifiably, it seemed) into suing the critic for libel. At best, Ruskin was portrayed as a privileged but naïve writer, who sometimes chose the right side (read: the avant-garde), but even on those occasions, his overwrought language was misguided, and easily became self-parody—perhaps Turner’s landscapes and the Pre-Raphaelite paintings fared better when speaking for themselves.
And then there’s the issue of Ruskin’s sexuality. As a teenager reading laudatory accounts of the avant-garde, it was clear to me that artists like D. G. Rossetti were on the side of liberation, while their enemies—the establishment—favored sexual repression. On this issue at least, Ruskin seemed to belong clearly to the establishment. Ruskin’s inability to consummate his wedding has provided many historians with a useful metaphor for Victorian culture in general and its supposedly puritanical views on sex. (I should note in passing that these caricatures of Ruskin—as a repressed prude or as an arrogant philistine—are hardly confined to twentieth century literature. One can see them perpetuated by recent 21st-century depictions of Ruskin in films like Effie Gray and Mr. Turner)
Despite (or because?) of these negative impressions of Ruskin, at this early stage I hadn’t really read him in his own words—save for a few out-of-context quotations or (as an MA student) a few edited selections of his more famous writings (mainly taken from Modern Painters I). What forced me to reconsider my opinion on Ruskin was the dawning realization that he and I actually shared a lot of the same opinions about the world in general—and that the image I had formed of Ruskin as a moralizing prude was a gross caricature. This re-evaluation was a gradual process, not an abrupt, Damascene moment. However, like St. Paul, my change of heart began during a journey. In the summer of 1996, after receiving my Masters in Art History, I travelled to Europe. It was not my first trip abroad—I had visited Italy as part of a group tour in 1994--but this was the first time that I had undertaken a solo journey. I saw places that I had only read about before—including the Doge’s Palace in Venice, the Byzantine monuments in Ravenna, Milan’s Duomo, the Swiss (and French) Alps, the Cathedral of Chartres, and London’s Tate Britain (still the “Tate Gallery,” without any modifier)—and saw them with my own eyes. These sights confirmed in me a love for both British Victorian paintings (as seen at the Tate) and for the sources that inspired them (whether natural scenery or Italian art and architecture).
By the time of this journey, I had read a little more of Ruskin’s writings than I had as a high school student. Not enough to have shaken my initial impression of the writer, but enough to know that Ruskin loved Venice, Gothic architecture, and the Alps. And having seen these things, all for the first time (with the exception of some Italian Gothic), I had similarly fallen under their spell. If Ruskin and I both loved the same geographic features and historical structures, perhaps we had more in common than I had appreciated before?
Since that 1996 trip, I’ve returned to Venice on six subsequent occasions—occasionally on holiday, although more often while conducting research for a project (for my PhD dissertation, which focused on the influence of Venetian Renaissance painting on the late Victorian artist Charles H. Shannon, and for my book on Ruskin’s own views on Venetian painting). On these visits, my experience of the city has been very different from that first trip, for one reason above all: I had finally read all of The Stones of Venice. While my familiarity with Ruskin’s writings would eventually extend to his social essays as well as his writings on art, Stones became my favorite text (and largely remains so to this day). It’s not his most brilliant writing, stylistically speaking (I would bestow that honor on Modern Painters, especially volumes I and V). It’s certainly not his most convincing writing, in terms of argumentation (Unto This Last and other socio-political texts of his are far more persuasive). Nevertheless, Stones is special to me, because it is, in many respects, the most Ruskinian of Ruskin’s texts. Indeed, it contains virtually every facet of Ruskin’s thoughts, no matter how maddeningly contradictory they are with one another (as in the multiple dates on which he pinpoints the commencement of the Fall of Venice, or in his criticism of Catholicism while celebrating medieval Christianity). Its scope is breathtaking, as Ruskin charts the entire history of a society from its settlement by refugees all the way to the contemporary (nineteenth-century) age of tourists and commercialism—and he does so with the most spell-binding language, with which he paints gloriously ekphrastic pictures of the richest historical sites of Venice, passages of Ruskin’s word-paintings that are the rival to any of Turner’s Venetian landscapes.
While much of the charm in the Stones is literary in nature, what I found (and continue to find) most compelling about it is how Ruskin’s observations—no matter how outlandish his conclusions might be—are based on the concrete experience of being in Venice—of walking over its marble bridges or gliding along its canals or upon the open lagoon in a gondola (or, in my case, more often a vaporetto—admittedly, not a form of transportation that Ruskin would have approved of). After I had read Stones in its entirety, I could see Venice with a new vision—which, thanks to Ruskin, had been tuned and focused to capture rich details that had escaped my attention during my first visit to the city. The palaces along the Grand Canal—which in 1996, I had admired in a general kind of way—now captivated me. As the vaporetto lumbered its way along the Grand Canal, I began classifying each façade by the style of its windows—First Order? Second? Third? and so on—and would become genuinely excited to see a palace with Fifth Order arches. Instead of just a blur of generically Venetian facades, my Ruskin-guided examinations of the cusps and moldings and marble inlays helped me to appreciate each palace as its own individual entity.
It’s not an exaggeration to call these visits “Ruskin-guided.” On more than one occasion, I’ve carried a portable copy of Stones with me—each volume sextodecimo-size, and making me feel like a priest holding a breviary—and have often read passages aloud as I explored Torcello’s cathedral and climbing its campanile, or while walking through the narrow streets that lead to the Piazza San Marco (starting on the Calle Larga XXII Marzo, with Ruskin’s comment “We find ourselves in a paved alley, some seven feet wide where it is widest, full of people…”). While passing by a small church hidden in one of the more obscure corners of the city, I’ve stopped to consult the third volume of Stones to see if it’s worth going inside, or if the “Venetian Index” informs me it’s “of no importance” (in which case I may still enter the church anyway, just to confirm or reject Ruskin’s impression).
As an art historian whose research focuses on Italian Renaissance sources for Victorian artists, Venice continues to be the topic on which my interests and Ruskin’s converge the most strongly. With Ruskin, I share an enthusiasm for Venetian painters like Carpaccio and Tintoretto (although my admiration for Titian is less qualified than Ruskin’s). Through Ruskin, I have come to admire the Byzantine and medieval sites of Venice. I have also realized, from visits to churches like San Moisè and the study of seventeenth-century era tomb monuments, that I’m not particularly fond of late Baroque art (which had once appealed to me as passionate and energetic, but now appears to me as overly-exaggerated and pompous). I have yet to consider the impact of natural scenery like the Alps on Ruskin’s thought, and doubt I ever will in a serious study—although I would like for one of my next European visits to focus on such Ruskinian sites as Chamonix.
I will also admit—now that I know the characters of the two men in more depth—that I would vastly prefer Ruskin’s company to that of Whistler (even if I admire Whistler’s art more than Ruskin ever did). While Whistler strikes me as uncouth and unbearably arrogant, Ruskin in contrast seems very human. Certainly, he had his eccentricities—although as a Victorian gentleman, he was hardly unique in that regard. And there are some issues on which I will always disagree with Ruskin (e.g., his support for British imperialism as a concept—even if he did not always approve of British political policies). But my worldview is not as black and white as it once was. When I was a teenager, it was easy to sort historical characters into one category or the other—the avant-garde heroes arrayed against their conservative enemies. As I’ve matured (and met more people, and visited more places), I’ve realized the world is rarely that simplistic. I’ve also developed a deep appreciation for people who not only change their views or beliefs, but who reflect on why this change has occurred. One can (and indeed, should) disagree with Ruskin on many points, but one could never accuse him of living an unexamined life. In that regard, at least, Ruskin certainly was remarkably consistent.
Last modified 15 June 2019