Section 2, Chapter 4, of Part I to the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
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n a letter to his father of July 1845, Ruskin describes the two schools of Renaissance
art as belonging to the separate regions of thought and feeling.
In the first school ("Pure Religious art. The School of Love") he
includes Angelico, Perugino, the early Raphael, Bellini, and others; in the
second ("The School of the Great Men. The School of Intellect"),
he includes Michelangelo, Giotto, Benozzo Gozzoli, and others. (After his discovery
of Tintoretto, he inserted that name, underscored, immediately below Michelangelo
[Shapiro, 144-145].) This letter follows by one day Ruskin's complaint about
the hardening of his feelings and the description of the starving child, inserted
to show (implicitly) that the critical mind stifles both charity and sexuality.
The suppression of memory and desire is one cause of the loss of the child's
sentiment of being, but the experience of too powerfully disturbing desires
signals a more devastating loss of the pristine energy. The first resolution
of this contradiction Ruskin found in the school of Tintoretto: the works of
a painter equal in intellectual strength to
Turner but whose subject is human
released a corresponding power of sympathetic identification, through
symbols that collapse human time into powerful oxymorons. The second resolution
he found in an art chaste, serene, brilliant in color, and rigid in form: the
works of the saintly Angelico sublimate the affections, inducing the experience
of sympathetic contemplation through symbols of beatified calm that transcend
change.
An example of the second form of beholding is Ruskin's discovery of the tomb of Ilaria di Caretto, an event that, although treated briefly in the letters, grew in importance during the rest of his life. In Lucca, we may recall, he spent several moments every evening beside the fifteenth-century effigy. In the book she appears at the end of "Repose, [79/80] or the Type of Divine Permanence," where Ruskin writes, "There is that about [the lips] which is not death nor sleep, but the pure image of both" (IV, 123) Unlike Ruskin's usual word paintings of this period, the present passage focuses carefully on detail instead of impression, conveying in its passionless factuality a different kind of absorption. Although she is but motionless stone, at each sunset she seems to die anew -- rather, she seems still alive; she is the "pure image" of sleep or death because Jacopo della Quercia had sculpted her neither rudely, which would destroy the illusion altogether, nor too precisely, which would create the illusion of actual death. As an idea she is timeless -- four hundred years old yet fresh-and so yields to the daily vigil by which, as in the repetition compulsion, Ruskin can ritualize loss. Her "dwelling is the light of setting suns."
Ruskin wanted to show that the same laws of beauty that pervade the natural world also inform the human figure, vet he approached that subject, he wrote Liddell, in "fear and trembling." The idealization of the female body consorts poorly with Ruskin's inherited Evangelicalism, yet his attempt to reconcile the two accords with a movement of thought and feeling general in Victorian culture -- a movement from what Walter Houghton called an ethic of earnestness to an ethic of aspiration. In the second beginning of Modern Painters II, the chapter on vital beauty in man, Ruskin shifts from the chastening imagery of sinfulness to the idealized imagery of aspiration, arguing that the aim of religious art is the restoration of fallen human nature. "Wrecked we are," he writes, "and nearly all to pieces; but that little good by which we are to redeem ourselves is to be got out of the old wreck, beaten about and full of sand though it be..., and so the only restoration of the body that we can reach is not to be coined out of our fancies, but to be collected out of such uninjured and bright vestiges of the old seal as we can find and set together" (IV, 177). Fresh from his visit to Italy, where false "restorers" had everywhere set up their scaffolds, chisels, and walls of plaster, Ruskin now proposes a genuine and spiritual restoration through the study of great art; yet the most forceful image of that project, for Ruskin, is not a vestige or remnant but a changeless female figure, the type of human permanence.
Tintoretto's Annunciation provides a central example. In this well-known passage, Ruskin draws attention to the Virgin sitting amid a mass of shattered brickwork (much like that which Tintoretto could have found in "the ruins of his own Venice") and a line of light formed by a carpenter's square that draws the viewer's eye to the cornerstone of the original building. "The ruined house is the Jewish dispensation; that obscurely arising in the dawning of the sky is the Christian; but the corner-stone of the old building remains, though the builders' tools lie idle beside it, and the stone which the builder refused is become the Headstone of the Corner" (IV, 264-265). As George P. [80/81] Landow has pointed out, Ruskin's typological reading crucially influenced Hunt and Millais in the early years of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 3 Biblical types-Old Testament events and figures that achieve symbolic "fulfillment" in the life of Christ-bridge disparate epochs of time by shadowing forth evidences of a coherent divine intention in history; but the expectant Virgin is herself a bridge, giving birth to a religion of Love founded on the rock of the law. In a similar way, the paradox of physical ruin and spiritual persistence determines the dramatic structure of The Stones of Venice, as we will see shortly.
The acceptance of human imperfection produces the vision of a transcendent feminine Other. Clearly enough, religious, emotional, and theoretical issues fuse with remarkable complexity in the question of the female figure in art and particularly in the kind of experience Ruskin associated with the "School of Love." What would be the poetics of a School of Love? And what will be its relation to the Protestant sublime described in Ruskin's first volume and in the chapter on penetrative imagination? Unfortunately, the attempt to answer these questions in Modern Painters II is indirect, hasty, and incomplete. The two concluding chapters, on contemplative imagination and on the "supernatural ideal," together present a potpourri of superficially unrelated topics, including a few comments on associative reverie (partly drawn from the theories of Alison), a description of early Renaissance stylistic conventions, and a concluding gallery of images collected from the whole range of the "pure religious" school. Yet these pages are indispensable to an understanding of the great work to follow once we are able to grasp their underlying unity-the subject of the feminine ideal as an object of nostalgic desire and religious devotion. In effect Ruskin gives us a fantasia on themes from Wordsworth and Dante. "Tintern Abbey," the poem that provided him with a paradigmatic description of boyish delight, also contains a paradigm of mature joy, a meditation on memory and time that is consummated in the poet's address to an idealized sister. More directly, Ruskin's move from nostalgia to vision parallels Dante's in the book he carried with him throughout Italy, which consummates the loss of a mortal love in the beatification of a heavenly one.
For Ruskin the activity of the contemplative imagination grows out of an essentially passive mental state, the state of reverie when remembered events blend together into simpler forms abstracted of their [81/82] disturbing elements. Similarly, the artistic imagination "depriv[es] the subject of material and bodily shape, and regarding such of its qualities only as it chooses for particular purpose ... forges these qualities together ... and gives to their abstract being consistency and reality, by striking them as it were with the die of an image belonging to other matter" (IV, 291). Ideal beauty, Ruskin implies-as shown, for example, in the clear, simple, and luminous forms of Angelico-takes a shape akin to memory Oust as, for Plato, the recognition of beautiful forms is in fact recollection). These remarks, which combine a theory of vision with a theory of metaphor, closely suggest Ruskin's own habit of projecting onto the external world the shapes of his own desire, sublimating his lost love in idealized imagery-as, for example, when he invested Venice with the presence of Adèle. Shelley, whom Ruskin knew well, described this process in his doctrine of the epipsyche. Ruskin only goes as far as to suggest some correspondence between the loved object and the lover's own best self that is similar to the "corresponding power" necessary to the viewer of sublime Art. In the section on vital beauty in man he writes, "the ideal of the good and perfect soul" is grasped only "by seeing and reaching forth of the better part of the soul to that of which it must first know the sweetness and goodness in itself" (IV, 177).
Sweetness and strength, love and power, belong to the ideal of an integrated self, which, I have suggested, Ruskin sought in the emblems of Italian art; in terms of aesthetic theory, they correspond to the categories of contemplation and sublimity, the "pure vision" of Angelico and the "wild thought" of Tintoretto (IV, 264). What Ruskin called "Intellect" and "Love," in other words, are really two forms of passionate experience, two modes of apprehension, and this polarity represents a dramatic expansion of Ruskin's aesthetic responses. The art of Angelico goes beyond what Ruskin usually means by "imagination," as I have suggested above: of Angelico's Annunciation, for example, Ruskin writes, "All is exquisite in feeling, but not inventive or imaginative" (IV, 264). We know from his letters that he did not rank Angelico high in execution, but a deeper reason for this judgment is Ruskin's tendency to think of sublime experience as alone "truly imaginative," since the artist reconstitutes his own power as the organizing center of his creations. Tintoretto "speaks out" his works, as Carlyle would say, from within him, while Angelico seems to contemplate rather than inhabit the work of his hands, existing therefore as a saintly temperament, not as a charismatic presence. And so one art is "thought," the other "vision." Ruskin's fascination with the jeweled coloring of early Renaissance art heightens this distinction. I previously defined beauty in Ruskin's thought as divine energy made visible, but Ruskin was also attracted to the neoclassical view that color is an adven [82/83] titious quality in things and is therefore freely granted by the Creator: in his notes in Venice he calls it "ennobling to all things," "an abstract quality, equally great wherever it occurs" (IV, 305n), and much later he calls it the sanctifying element in art, the type of Love. Burke had distinguished between the rough and masculine power of the sublime and the pleasing, gentle, feminine character of the beautiful. For Ruskin, sublime art induces identification with masculine energy, visionary art contemplation of the beautiful as an object; in religious terms one form of art is "taken in" like the eucharist, the other beheld as an icon or memorial. This complex dichotomy dominates Ruskin's mature career as an art critic.
As I have implied, the dichotomy also corresponds to two alternate descriptions of the physical universe. In one account, devised to defend an art faithful to observed fact, the kinetic vitality of things predominates over their containing forms; the "character" of each object is a mode of energy disclosed by surface features and joined to an infinite system of energies that is the perpetual activity of the divine mind; mortality and loss are overcome by the inexhaustibility of natural abundance. In the other account, devised to defend an art faithful to supernatural truths, the forms of things predominate over their kinetic activity; the inertia of matter is refined away by the contemplative eye until "ideal" nature reveals itself as a world of changeless objects suffused by radiance. Mortality and loss are overcome by the symbolism of a final transfiguration that redeems the purity of the original state of beings now fallen. In the first account, all living things, including fallen man, define themselves by struggling toward fulfillment. In the second the world is seen as it will appear in eternity, with all humans connected by the presence of God in each. In Modern Painters II this cosmological account appears first in the section on Purity, the Type of Divine Energy, which attempts to explain why certain objects, such as crystals and the glowing health of the human face, strike us as inherently more beautiful than other objects. By adding to matter the purity of this energy, the artist "may in some measure spiritualize even matter itself." The best-known example of such a "spiritualized" vision of matter is of course the City of God, where "the river of the water of life ... is clear as crystal, and the pavement of the city is pure gold 'like unto clear glass"' (IV, 133-134; see Sherburne, Chap. 1).
The portmanteau idea provides a pseudophysical basis for the familiar theological oppositions between light and dark, life and death, and purity and corruption while also permitting Ruskin to combine the romantic doctrine of organic form (the "vital and energetic connection" [83/84] of parts) with the Neoplatonic radiance. He could also reconcile ideal beauty with biblical imagery and so equate idealization in art with prophecy -- all the while preparing the way for a defense of the school of Angelico, with its reduction of objects to luminous, jewellike surfaces and accents of gold. All these joinings are consummated in the last paragraphs of the book, which present in climactic sequence a gallery of apocalyptic pictures: first the Archangel Michael, a bodily form converted into the habitation of infinite power ("vessel and instrument of Omnipotence, filled like a cloud with the victor light"); then the Madonnas and martyrs in rapt contemplation ("in whom the hues of the morning and the solemnity of eve, the gladness in accomplished promise, and sorrow of the sword-pierced heart, are gathered into one human Lamp of ineffable love"); and finally the angel choirs of Angelico, "listening in the pauses of alternate song, for the prolonging of the trumpet blast, and the answering of psaltery and cymbal, throughout the endless deep, and from all the star shores of heaven" (IV, 330-332). The temporal dimension of this vision is a single pulse of expectation-literally the moment between the sounds of the final trump, the instant between promise and fulfillment. But the spatial dimension is Dantean in its completeness, for the sound encircles the cosmos. The solitary mount by the Brevent is transformed into a pyramid of "sublimated humanity."
Like the vision in the Alps in Ruskin's first volume, the conclusion of his second strains beyond its subject, this time toward the idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk multitudinous in its unity, embodying all the forms of human perfection including intellectual grasp and purity of spirit, huge as an epic poem yet frozen in time like a painting, acting in fact not as the expression of a single great mind only but as a beacon or lamp to fallen human nature. From the solitary and timeless ecstasies of Modern Painters I Ruskin turns at last to architecture, the most collective of all art forms and the means by which humans most literally strive to imitate the City of God. A great church, inscribed in what Ruskin called the language of types, conveys a transtemporal vision of redemption, yet as a material object it also participates in the history of mankind fallen, struggling, and triumphing.
Bruns, Gerald. "The Formal Nature of Victorian Thinking," PMLA 90 (1975), 905.
Ruskin, John. Works. Ed. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. 39 vols. London: George Allen, 1903-1912.
Ruskin, John. The Ruskin's Family Letter ed. Van Akin Burd, 2 vols. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973.
Ruskin, John. The Diaries of John Ruskin ed. Joanne Evans and John Howard Whitehouse, 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956.
Sherburne, James Clark. John Ruskin; or, The Ambiguities of Abundance. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972.
Last modified December 2000