A major source of such Ruskinian word painting, perhaps the only one of any significance, is Ann Radcliffe, whose novels first fully developed the technique of creating visually patterned prose. Thus, although art criticism may have been the first form of nonfiction to attempt a phenomenology of experience, the novels of Ann Radcliffe had managed to create one decades earlier. The poetry of Wordsworth, which had a great influence upon Ruskin, also helped advance the development of experiential prose. Ruskin, who developed several forms of visually oriented prose, relied upon word-painting from the beginning to the end of his career, and he almost always employed it within the sage's characteristic rhythm of satire and vision or positive example.

The simplest kind of Ruskinian and other word-painting takes the form of following one set or series of visual details by others in no particular order, whereas a second kind establishes a seeing or camera eye before which move various elements of a scene.

Ruskin's third characteristic technique, which produces what we may anachronistically term a cinematic prose, proceeds by first establishing a center of consciousness that organizes the scene like a camera lens. Having established his narrative center or fictive eye, he then moves it either through or across his described scene -- that is, he either turns this camera eye upon its axis, in effect panning across the scene, or else he changes the perceiving eye's distance to the scene, moving it closer (or into) the scene, or farther away to provide a distant view. Such literary strategies provide verbal art with a means of composing and ordering a linguistic description, thereby endowing it with some of the elements and capacities of the visual arts. This inevitably kinetic description possesses an energy that merely additive and accumulatory forms do not. Examples of this third, or protocinematic, form of word-painting in Ruskin's works include his elaborate description of La Riccia (3.278-80) in the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), his satiric look at Claude's Il Mulino and the Roman scenery it purports to depict in the 1844 preface to-that same volume (3.41-43), and many passages in The Stones of Venice ( 1851-53), particularly his tour of St. Mark's (10.17-19), his narrative of the approach to Torcello (10.79-90), and his aerial view of the Mediterranean Sea (10.18-87).

All three forms of word-painting match Ruskin's own description of truly imaginative landscape representation. Several passages in Modern Painters explain that both the novice and the painter without imagination must content themselves with a merely topographical art of visual fact. According to the fourth volume of Modern Painters, "The aim of the great inventive landscape painter," in contrast, "must be to give the far higher and deeper truth of mental vision, rather than that of the physical facts, and to reach a representation which ... shall yet be capable of producing on the far-away beholder's mind precisely the impression which the reality would have produced" (6.35). In this higher form of art, Ruskin says, "the artist not only places the spectator, but . . . makes him a sharer in his own strong feelings and quick thoughts" (3.134). In other words, the great imaginative artist, whether he works in words or in paint, grants us the privilege of momentarily seeing with his eyes and imaginative vision: We experience his phenomenological relation to the world.

For Ruskin, as for other sages who employ such word-painting, these passages of highly wrought prose function within a larger structure of argument. In particular, they serve as a major part of that complex rhythm of satire and romantic vision that characterizes the proceedings of the sage. In the earlier volumes of Modern Painters, for example, where Ruskin employs it to defend Turner against the claims of older art, this structure first presents a satirical word-painting of a work by an old master and then follows it by one either of a relevant work by Turner or of a scene the older work was supposed to represent. The chapter "Of the Truth of Colour," in the first volume, begins by looking at Gaspar Poussin's La Riccia in the National Gallery, after which Ruskin presents his own impressions of the original scene. Writing with heavy sarcasm, he easily conveys the impression that Poussin's painting reveals little concern with presenting the facts of a particular place.

It is a town on a hill, wooded with two-and-thirty bushes, of very uniform size, and possessing about the same number of leaves each. These bushes are all painted in with one dull opaque brown, becoming very slightly greenish towards the lights, and discover in one place a bit of rock, which of course would in nature have been cool and grey beside the lustrous hues of foliage, and which, therefore, being moreover completely in shade, is consistently and scientifically painted of a very clear, pretty, and positive brick red, the only thing like colour in the picture. The foreground is a piece of road which, in order to make allowance for its greater nearness, for its being completely in light, and, it may be presumed, for the quantity of vegetation usually present on carriage-roads, is given in a very cool green grey; and the truth of the picture is completed by a number of dots in the sky on the right, with a stalk to them of a sober and similar brown. (3.277-78)

Immediately after this harshly sarcastic rendering, Ruskin employs his familiar strategy of drawing upon his own experience of a scene that a work of art has presented. He begins by citing autobiography in order to certify the authenticity of the experience he is about to narrate: "Not long ago," he tells us, "I was slowly descending this very bit of carriage-road, the first turn after you leave Albano." Ruskin, who always emphasizes the change, variety, and energy of nature, then provides metereological fact that conveys the effect of a scene suffused with such energy and motion: "It had been wild weather when I left Rome, and all across the Campagna the clouds were sweeping in sulphurous blue, with a clap of thunder or two, and breaking gleams of sun along the Claudian aqueduct lighting up the infinity of its arches like the bridge of chaos." Having thus sketched in the background of his word picture, he presents himself moving upward through the scene until he catches sight of another vision of beauty in movement. "As I climbed the long slope of the Alban Mount, the storm swept finally to the north, and the noble outline of the domes of Albano, and the graceful darkness of its ilex grove, rose against pure streaks of alternate blue and amber; the upper sky gradually flushing through the last fragments of rain-cloud in deep palpitating azure, half aether and half dew." At this point, Ruskin, as he so often does, follows the path of light irradiating a landscape: "The noonday sun came slanting down the rocky slopes of La Riccia, and their masses of entangled and tall foliage, whose autumnal tints were mixed with the wet verdure of a thousand evergreens, were penetrated with it as with rain." Having thus led us to a Ruskinian epiphany, a Ruskinian vision of the earthly paradise, he sets before us a scene that combines all the beauty and sublimity of earth, sea, and heavens:

I cannot call it colour, it was conflagration. Purple, and crimson, and scarlet, like the curtains of God's tabernacle, the rejoicing trees sank into the valley in showers of light, every separate leaf quivering with buoyant and burning life; each, as it turned to reflect or to transmit the sunbeam, first a torch and then an emerald. Far up into the recesses of the valley, the green vistas arched like the hollows of mighty waves of some crystalline sea, with the arbutus flowers dashed along their flanks for foam, and silver flakes of orange spray tossed into the air around them, breaking over the grey walls of rock into a thousand separate stars, fading and kindling alternately as the weak wind lifted and let them fall. Every glade of grass burned like the golden floor of heaven, opening in sudden gleams as the foliage broke and closed above it, as sheetlightning opens in a cloud at sunset. (3.27~79)

Here as elsewhere, Ruskin convinces us of his position by means of a superbly controlled alternation of vision and satire, preparing us for his polemic at each step of the way by allowing us to borrow his eyes and see. His skill at presenting us with his experience of landscape and landscape art continually makes us believe that his critical opponents and the painters he attacks both work from theory, from recipes, rather than from vision. In thus demonstrating his superiority to the critics of Turner, Ruskin proves himself a master of experience several times over. At the very least, he has described to us an Italian scene that we cannot otherwise experience without traveling to that location. Second, he has shared with us his own deeply felt experience of a particularly beautiful landscape. But as we read his narration of that experience -- and Ruskin's presentations of such landscapes take the form, we remember, of narrations and not static descriptions -- we realize that few, if any, of us could have perceived this scene so intensely. Ruskin, following his own prescriptions for imaginative art, has made us "a sharer in his own strong feelings and quick thoughts," and we also realize that the astonishing energy and movement of his mind, which appear in his lightningfast associations, metaphors, and other analogies, match those of the scene he presents. In other words, unlike us, he is adequate to the experience.

Finally, his presentation of landscape experience, which makes clear that he has true vision and the opposing critics are blinded by convention and insensitivity, also goes beyond beautiful description and presents a spiritual promise, an authentic visionary moment. In thus making us see and feel -- in a word, experience -- a divine presence in nature, Ruskin demonstrates that visual imperceptiveness, such as that which afflicts the critics of Turner, does society more harm than merely destroying taste. It prevents us from authentically experiencing the natural world, thereby robbing us of pleasure and solace, and furthermore, it contributes to spiritual blindness or insensitivity as well, since it keeps us from experiencing God in nature.