Footnote 7, Chapter 4, 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.
indicates a link to material not in the original print version. [GPL]. Coleridge provides a similar view of religious art in The Statesman's Manual, using his particular vocabulary. According to Coleridge, religion considers the individual in the universal (thus sympathizing with both the understanding and the reason) and therefore has always been the "parent and fosterer of the Fine Arts, as of Poetry, Music, Painting, &c. the common essence of which consists in a similar union of the Universal and the Individual. In this union, moreover, is contained the true sense of the IDEAL. Under the old Law the altar, the curtains, the priestly vestments, and whatever else was to represent the BEAUTY OF HOLINESS, had an ideal character: and the Temple itself was a master-piece of Ideal Beauty" (Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White, in Collected Works, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 16 vols. [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969-], VI, 62). This Neoplatonic notion of ideal beauty is clearly what Ruskin means by "ideal" in Modern Pointers II. Landow and others have noted that Ruskin's instances of "typical beauty" in that volume reflect a neoclassical taste for rationalized calm and emotional order, a taste in conflict with his crude attacks on neoclassical theory (he describes neoclassical art as a heterogeneous pasting together of choice parts into a single composition). But typical beauty for Ruskin is probably closer to the Coleridgean radiance than to neoclassical notions, as is suggested by the pervasive use of the biblical imagery of light in that book. For Coleridge's possible influence on Ruskin, see Chapter 5.
Last modified December 2000