Manuscript of First Draft of Modern Painters

Paul L. Sawyer, Professor of English, Cornell University

Footnote 1, Chapter 3, of 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.

On the manuscript of the first draft of Modern Painters II, see the introduction to Harold I. Shapiro, ed., Ruskin in Italy (London: Clarendon Press, 1972), to which I shall henceforth refer in text as "Shapiro."

For the standard account of Ruskin's theories of beauty and the critical traditions to which they belong, see George P. Landow, The Aesthetic and Critical Theories ofJohn Ruskin, chap. 2. Landow argues that typical beauty and vital beauty derive from separate critical traditions, one neoclassical and the other emotionalist, and so form a "bifurcated aesthetic." Other writers have suggested ways of reconciling the bifurcation. I would stress that Ruskin's neoclassicism also draws heavily from Neoplatonic tradition, and perhaps from readings in Plato suggested to him by Liddell, as part of his project of defending the early Renaissance school.

Last modified December 2000