Ruskin
and the “Paradise of all Cities.”
 |
| “The Author of Modern Painters”, 1843, engraving after lost watercolour |
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| J.M.W. Turner, Approach to Venice, ex RA, 1844, NGA, Washington, oil on canvas, 62 x 94 cm. LINK |
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| John Ruskin, The Palazzo-Contarini-Fasan on the Grand Canal, Venice, 1841, Ashmoleon Museum, Oxford, pencil on paper. LINK |
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| Samuel Prout, The Palazzo-Contarini-Fasan on the Grand Canal, Venice, after 1841, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, watercolour and body colour, 43.4 x 30.2 cm. |
On his first
journey to Venice with his parents John James and Margaret Ruskin in 1835, the
young John Ruskin took the opportunity to make pencil drawings of architecture
and jot down his thoughts on being in the city in the sea. Later, his older
self, looking back with both feelings of nostalgia and melancholy, notes that
in a diary of entry of 6th May, his younger self proclaimed exultantly: “Thank
God I am here; it is the Paradise of all cities.” In his autobiography, Praeterita, Ruskin excitedly records his
anticipation of Venice as his family make their way from Padua towards the city
in 1835. His first actual sight of Venice leads to rapturous observations (“the
black knot of gondolas in the canal of the Mestre, more beautiful to me than a
sunrise of clouds all scarlet and gold”) as well as the reflection that his
Venice “like Turner’s” has been mainly created for critic and artist by Byron.[1] With
some reservations, Byron was also admired by John James who was actually an
amateur artist who owned a watercolour by Turner and who encouraged his son’s
interest in art.” [2] As
Robert Hewison points out, Ruskin “imagined Venice long before he saw the
city.”[3] His
first visit was an imaginary one: a visit in 1833, at the age of fourteen, when
the Ruskin family travelled to Italian destinations including Turin, Genoa and
Milan; but the family’s plans of going on to Venice were thwarted by a hot
summer, so they retreated to Switzerland. Ruskin’s vivid imagination compensated
by creating some juvenile stanzas on the Jewel of the Adriatic; and the fund of
images were derived from a variety of sources: chiefly, Byron, Shelley and
Samuel Rogers. Ruskin’s initial interest in Venice had been sparked by reading Rogers’s
Italy, which included engravings of Venice by the artists J.M. W. Turner
and Thomas Stothard. Ruskin also admired the watercolourist Samuel Prout whose
style influenced the young artist’s first drawings of Venice.
The Stones
of Years: The Architectural Record.
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| Angle of the Portico, Ducal Palace, Venice with carving of Judgement of Solomon |
 |
| John Ruskin, The South Side of the Basilica of St Mark’s, Venice, from the Loggia of the Doge’s Palace, c. 1851, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, pencil and watercolour, heightened with white, on three joined pieces of paper, 95.9 x 45.4 cm |
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| John Ruskin, Study of Archivolt in St Mark’s, Venice, 1850-51, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, pencil and wash, with some watercolour, 38.2 x 54.7 cm |
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| John Ruskin, Plate XIV, The Orders of Venetian Arches, in The Stones of Venice, vol. 2, 1853, engraving. |
A decade
later, in 1845, Ruskin was allowed to travel to Venice without his parents, to
start preliminary research for his magnum opus, The Stones of Venice all
of which was funded by John James. A mammoth undertaking, the publication of
the first volume of SV would have to wait until 1851, the other two volumes, in
1853, the whole sequence complete by 1860. As Hewison says, SV contains two discourses:
“the language of technical description”; and the “richer rhetoric of religious
evocation.”[4] Ruskin’s
method is innovative: the books were the result of microscopic research and
physical labour examining the buildings and monuments of Venice on the spot.
Ruskin went back to basics, quarrying the material of raw data, and eventually
processing his findings through rigorous analysis. He made extensive drawings
of architectural features such as capitols, griffons, lintels, which bring the
reader back to first principles. Another
aspect of the SV project was that it helped to shape Ruskin’s views on work and
society: there was pleasure in the stonemason’s work, who though low in the
social order, was like an artist: dignified and secure in his own belief in his
craft. As Ruskin’s biographer, John Batchelor notes this was “a romantic view
of work opposed to the mid- Victorian protestant ethic.” The Great Man or
artist can “undo the social structure supporting the gentleman and invoke
instead the genius.”[5]
Ruskin's working methods that led to the SV suggest a lack of ambition, but not
drive. Given high intellect, an original cast of mind, and a far-seeking
curiosity, this is the mark of the genius. If Ruskin had lived during the
renaissance, he would have resembled somebody like Leonardo da Vinci, and his project
drawings and notes suggest the same kind of obsession. Unfortunately, this pleasure
in incessant work left little time for his young, beautiful bride Euphemia
(Effie) Gray whom Ruskin had married on 10th April, 1848. Ruskin was far too
preoccupied with the architectural story of Venice to be distracted by his
marriage. Famously, the marriage was never consummated and Effie Gray would eventually
leave Ruskin for the painter Millais who, ironically, was painting Ruskin's portrait
as he fell in love with his wife. Ruskin would embark on another disastrous
relationship by transferring his attentions to a young girl, Rose La Touche, a
ten year old daughter of an Irish banker. There was innocence about this
because Rose represented an emblem of purity, something unattainable like the
object of a medieval quest. Fully immersed in Tennyson Morte d’Arthur,
Dante’s Vita Nuova and identifying with the chivalric St George of
Carpaccio’s cycle, Ruskin wove the strands of autobiography, myth, legend and
art together into a complicated tapestry completely impenetrable to anyone but
its author.
Ruskin
and the Venetian School of Painting.
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| “John” Bellini, Frari Triptych, Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice, 1488, oil on panel. |
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| Titian, The Entombment, 1523-26, Museé du Louvre, oil on canvas, 148 x 205 cm. |
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| Tintoretto, The Crucifixion, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice, 1565, oil on canvas. |
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| John Ruskin, Copy after the Central Portion of Tintoretto’s “The Crucifixion” in the Scuola Grande di san Rocco, Venice, 1845, Ruskin Library, University of Lancaster, pencil, chalk, ink and watercolour on paper, 27 x 53.5 cm. |
A system of
religious values – see below- informs many of Ruskin’s reflections on Venetian
painting in his SV. According to Ruskin, Titian’s religion
was like that of Shakespeare: “occult behind his magnificent equity” (MP, V) But
what Ruskin found most objectionable in Titian (and Giorgione) was that they
made the body the principle subject of painting: “Sensual passion in man was,
not only a fact, but a Divine fact” (MP, V), views which betray Ruskin’s
discomfort with the human body just as much as puritan attitudes towards Catholic
art.[6]
By contrast, Ruskin claimed that Tintoretto’s mind was “deeper” and more
“serious” than Titian’s, his tone therefore more suited to devotion.[7]
Ruskin “discovered” Tintoretto in 1845 on a visit to the Scuola di San Rocco,
and in the third volume of his SV, he declared that the
traveller should "give unembarrassed attention and unbroken time" to
the marvels of Tintorettos within. Ruskin described nearly every work by
Tintoretto in the city, and he would eventually come to rate Tintoretto above
all other renaissance painters. In a letter to his father in 1845, Ruskin
praised Tintoretto in glowing terms: “I never was so utterly crushed to the
earth before any human intellect as I was today- before Tintoret. Just be so
good as to take my list of painters and put him in the school of Art at the
top-top-top-of everything, with a big black line underneath.” Tintoretto was
the first painter that Ruskin identified with his own experiences and own
aesthetic beliefs. In addition to writing extensively on Tintoretto in the
second volume of Modern Painters, Ruskin made copies of some of his works like
the Circumcision, now, sadly, thought
to be a product of the painter’s studio. Many of Ruskin’s interpretations are
of details,- fragments of large works, perhaps indicating the critic’s interest
in iconography and the use of symbols. Holman-Hunt told Millais, obviously
estranged from Ruskin, how the critic “describes pictures of the Venetian
school in such a manner that you see them with your inner sight, and you feel
that the men who did them had been appointed by God, like old prophets, to bear
a sacred message.”[8] On
a visit to Venice in 1866 Ruskin read to Hunt passages from MP in front of Tintoretto’s paintings,- but these extracts concerned aesthetic and
formal ideas rather than religious symbolism, which chimes in with Ruskin’s
modified views on religion.[9]
Changing
Values: Ruskin, Piety and Venetian Colour.
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| Charles Fairfax Murray, John Ruskin, 1875, Tate Britain, London, watercolour and gouache on paper, 476 x 311 mm. LINK |
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| Vincenzo Catena, (prev. att to Titian), Portrait of Doge Andrea Gritti, 1523-31, ( prev owned by John Ruskin), National Gallery, London, , oil on canvas, 97.2 x 79.4 cm. LINK |
.jpg) |
| John Ruskin (after Paolo Veronese), Negro Page and Parrots from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, 1858, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, watercolour, gouache, and graphite on cream wove paper, 57 x 44.5 cm. LINK |
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| Vittorio Carpaccio, The Dream of St Ursula, 1495, Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice, tempera on canvas, 274 x 267 cm. |
In what
Ruskin called “the mare maggiore”, or wide sea of Venetian painting, the critic
had his own favourite islands and landmarks, though his preferences changed
over time. Initially, in SV, the artists Giorgione, Titian and Veronese are
subject to harsh criticism, mainly for their colour which is seen as sensual. Not
only do these artists fail to satisfy Ruskin’s standards for painting, but are
deemed to be lacking in piety, a more serious failing in this critic’s eyes.
Stylistic “decay” was a symptom of what Ruskin saw as deterioration in
Christian values: "The evidence might be accumulated a thousandfold from
the works of Veronese, and of every succeeding religious painter, that the
fifteenth-century had taken away the religious heart of Venice." In the
third volume of MP, Ruskin created a hierarchy of painters based on both spiritual
and aesthetic values: at the top was Fra Angelico because he loved all
“spiritual beauty”; next was Paolo Veronese and Correggio, “intensely loving
physical and corporeal beauty” of the second rank; and lastly, Dürer, Rubens,
generally Northern artists, “insensible to beauty and caring only for truth.”[10]
However, it seems that a crisis point might have been reached during a six week
visit to Turin in 1858 which may have caused Ruskin to question his own beliefs
about art and faith, even occasioning an un-conversion, what Ruskin called his
“Queen of Sheba Crash.” At Turin, Ruskin made copies of parts of Veronese’s
large work, Solomon and the Queen of
Sheba, and while there are many factors motivating Ruskin’s interest in
this large canvas, according to Hewison, it was chiefly the difference between
“the beauty of its imagery and the ugliness of the Protestantism that he
encountered in Turin” that affected Ruskin.[11]
This would have consequences: by 1860, even Fra Angelico and the Florentines
would lose their status as Ruskin carefully re-evaluated Venetian colour
claiming moral and spiritual values in colorito,
detectible in the hues in the landscape, God’s creation.[12] Carpaccio was another late interest- but the painter nearly tipped the critic over the edge. In the late 1870s Ruskin came close to a pyschological breakdown as he began to see symbols in Carpaccio's paintings like plants and parrots that convinced him the dead Rose La Touche was trying to communicate with him!
Venetian Coda.
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| Vittore Carpaccio, St George and the Dragon, 1502, Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, Venice, tempera on canvas, 141 x 360 cm. |
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| John Ruskin, Portrait of Rose La Touche? 1861, Ruskin Library, Lancaster, pencil, watercolour and bodycolour |
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| Frederick Hollyer, Photograph of Ruskin, 1894 |
By the time
the fifth volume of MP was published in 1860, Venetian colour had been reappraised;
Ruskin’s design for art history had been completely overhauled with Titian and
Giorgione favourably situated; and colour was accommodated within the context
of natural theology, partly solving Ruskin’s anxiety about reconciling his protestant
views with aesthetic appreciation. Now, in his list of top seven colourists,
four are Venetian: “There have been only seven supreme colourists among the
true painters whose works exist (namely, Giorgione, Titian, Veronese, Tintoret,
Correggio, Reynolds and Turner.”[13]
The placing of Giorgione and Turner at opposite ends of a critical spectrum is
significant: Giorgione, and by implication Venice, is now thought of as an artist
in Paradise unlike Turner in London who now has to paint a city rank with sin;
Giorgione painted the deathless calm dignity of man; but like a social critic, Turner
was forced to record the materialism of his age, and the unsightliness that it
brought. Out of the dark despair at what he called the “the impure gloom of
modern Italy”, in Ruskin’s mind symbolised by the shriek of steamboat whistles
that drowned out the gondolier’s cry, would emerge Ruskin the social theorist, educational
reformer and public intellectual with a conscience. [14]
And it would be another symbol, this time from Venetian painting, that would
serve Ruskin in the 1870s: Carpaccio’s St George would not only become a symbol
of his own conflicted thoughts on the dead Rose La Touche who had to be rescued
from the underworld like Proserpina; but also an emblem of the crusade against the dragon of materialism
whose putrefying and skeletal victims are strewn around the monster, perhaps symbolic
of the Paradise lost to modernity,- Venice herself?
Slides.
1)
“The Author of Modern Painters”, 1843, engraving after
lost watercolour,
2) J.M.W. Turner, Richmond Hill and Bridge, c. 1828, British Museum, watercolour and bodycolour heightened with white on paper, 291 x 435 mm.
3) John Ruskin (after Copley Fielding), Loch Achray, 1834-1835, watercolour
4) J.M.W. Turner, Approach to Venice, ex RA, 1844, NGA, Washington, oil on canvas, 62 x 94 cm.
5) John Ruskin, The Palazzo-Contarini-Fasan on the Grand Canal, Venice, 1841,
6) Samuel Prout, The Palazzo-Contarini-Fasan on the Grand Canal, Venice, after 1841, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, watercolour and body colour, 43.4 x 30.2 cm.
7) J.M.W. Turner, Juliet and her Nurse, Private Collection, Argentina, 1836, oil on canvas, 92 x 23 cm.
8) Aerial View of Venice
9) View of St Mark’s Basilica.
10) John Ruskin, The South Side of the Basilica of St Mark’s, Venice, from the Loggia of the Doge’s Palace, c. 1851, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, pencil and watercolour, heightened with white, on three joined pieces of paper, 95.9 x 45.4 cm.[15]
11) John Ruskin, Study of Archivolt in St Mark’s, Venice, 1850-51, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, pencil and wash, with some watercolour, 38.2 x 54.7 cm.[16]
12) John Ruskin, Plate XIV, The Orders of Venetian Arches, in The Stones of Venice, vol. 2, 1853, engraving.
13) View of the Ducal Palace.
14) “John” Bellini, Frari Triptych, Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice, 1488, oil on panel. “..Its chief pictorial treasure is the John Bellini in the sacristy, the most finished and delicate example of the master in Venice.”
15) Titian, The Entombment, 1523-26, Museé du Louvre, oil on canvas, 148 x 205 cm.
16) Façade of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, 1516-49, marble.” [17]
17) Tintoretto, The Crucifixion, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice, 1565, oil on canvas.[18]
18) John Ruskin, Copy after the Central Portion of Tintoretto’s “The Crucifixion” in the Scuola Grande di san Rocco, Venice, 1845, Ruskin Library, University of Lancaster, pencil, chalk, ink and watercolour on paper, 27 x 53.5 cm.[19]
19) Tintoretto, The Circumcision, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice,1583-87, oil on canvas.
20) John Ruskin, Drawing of Tintoretto’s “Circumcision” in Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice, 1869, Ashmoleon, Oxford, pencil, watercolour, and body colour on paper, 34.8 x 39.2 cm.[20]
21) John Ruskin, Study of the Child in Tintoretto’s “Circumcision” in Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice, 1869, watercolour and body colour over pencil on paper, 34.1 x 50.6 cm.[21]
22) Edward Burne-Jones, Copy after Tintoretto’s The Circumcision, probably 1862, Ashmoleon Museum, Oxford, watercolour and bodycolour on paper, 18.1 x 24 cm.
23) Previously att to Paolo Veronese, now thought to be by Benedetto Caliari, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, c. 1582, Galleria Sabauda, Turin, oil on canvas,
24) Detail: Queen of Sheba and her Handmaids
25) John Ruskin (after Paolo Veronese), Negro Page from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, 1858, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, watercolour, gouache, and graphite on cream wove paper, 57 x 44.5 cm.
26) John Ruskin, View from the Palazzo Bembo to the Palazzo Grimani, Venice, 1870, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, pencil and watercolour on paper, 35.3 x 50.8 cm.[22]
27) Vittorio Carpaccio, The Dream of St Ursula, 1495, Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice, tempera on canvas, 274 x 267 cm
28) John Ruskin, Drawing of Carpaccio’s “Dream of St Ursula”, from “The Legend of St Ursula” , 1876, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, watercolour and bodycolour over pencil on paper, 29.4 x 27.6 cm.[23]
29) John Ruskin, Head of St Ursula, from Carpaccio’s “Dream of St Ursula” , 1877, Somerville College, Oxford, watercolour on paper, 57 x 40 cm.[24]
30) John Ruskin, Portrait of Rose La Touche, ? 1861, Ruskin Library, Lancaster, pencil, watercolour and bodycolour.
31) Charles Fairfax Murray, John Ruskin, 1875, Tate Britain, London, watercolour and gouache on paper, 476 x 311 mm.
32) John Ruskin, Study of Verbena in Carpaccio’s “Dream of St Ursula”, Private Collection (Sir Stephen Oliver), 1876-7, watercolour on paper, 37 x 31 cm.[25]
33) John Ruskin, San Giorgio Maggiore, the Basin of St Mark’s and a Balcony of Casa-Contarini-Fasan, 1876, Private Collection, pencil, watercolour, bodycolour, 1876.
34) Vincenzo Catena, (prev. att to Titian), Portrait of Doge Andrea Gritti, 1523-31, National Gallery, London, , oil on canvas, 97.2 x 79.4 cm.
35) Vittore Carpaccio, St George and the Dragon, 1502, Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, Venice, tempera on canvas, 141 x 360 cm.
36) Frederick Hollyer, Photograph of Ruskin, 1894 and Venetian Sunset.
2) J.M.W. Turner, Richmond Hill and Bridge, c. 1828, British Museum, watercolour and bodycolour heightened with white on paper, 291 x 435 mm.
3) John Ruskin (after Copley Fielding), Loch Achray, 1834-1835, watercolour
4) J.M.W. Turner, Approach to Venice, ex RA, 1844, NGA, Washington, oil on canvas, 62 x 94 cm.
5) John Ruskin, The Palazzo-Contarini-Fasan on the Grand Canal, Venice, 1841,
6) Samuel Prout, The Palazzo-Contarini-Fasan on the Grand Canal, Venice, after 1841, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, watercolour and body colour, 43.4 x 30.2 cm.
7) J.M.W. Turner, Juliet and her Nurse, Private Collection, Argentina, 1836, oil on canvas, 92 x 23 cm.
8) Aerial View of Venice
9) View of St Mark’s Basilica.
10) John Ruskin, The South Side of the Basilica of St Mark’s, Venice, from the Loggia of the Doge’s Palace, c. 1851, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, pencil and watercolour, heightened with white, on three joined pieces of paper, 95.9 x 45.4 cm.[15]
11) John Ruskin, Study of Archivolt in St Mark’s, Venice, 1850-51, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, pencil and wash, with some watercolour, 38.2 x 54.7 cm.[16]
12) John Ruskin, Plate XIV, The Orders of Venetian Arches, in The Stones of Venice, vol. 2, 1853, engraving.
13) View of the Ducal Palace.
14) “John” Bellini, Frari Triptych, Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice, 1488, oil on panel. “..Its chief pictorial treasure is the John Bellini in the sacristy, the most finished and delicate example of the master in Venice.”
15) Titian, The Entombment, 1523-26, Museé du Louvre, oil on canvas, 148 x 205 cm.
16) Façade of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, 1516-49, marble.” [17]
17) Tintoretto, The Crucifixion, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice, 1565, oil on canvas.[18]
18) John Ruskin, Copy after the Central Portion of Tintoretto’s “The Crucifixion” in the Scuola Grande di san Rocco, Venice, 1845, Ruskin Library, University of Lancaster, pencil, chalk, ink and watercolour on paper, 27 x 53.5 cm.[19]
19) Tintoretto, The Circumcision, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice,1583-87, oil on canvas.
20) John Ruskin, Drawing of Tintoretto’s “Circumcision” in Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice, 1869, Ashmoleon, Oxford, pencil, watercolour, and body colour on paper, 34.8 x 39.2 cm.[20]
21) John Ruskin, Study of the Child in Tintoretto’s “Circumcision” in Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice, 1869, watercolour and body colour over pencil on paper, 34.1 x 50.6 cm.[21]
22) Edward Burne-Jones, Copy after Tintoretto’s The Circumcision, probably 1862, Ashmoleon Museum, Oxford, watercolour and bodycolour on paper, 18.1 x 24 cm.
23) Previously att to Paolo Veronese, now thought to be by Benedetto Caliari, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, c. 1582, Galleria Sabauda, Turin, oil on canvas,
24) Detail: Queen of Sheba and her Handmaids
25) John Ruskin (after Paolo Veronese), Negro Page from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, 1858, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, watercolour, gouache, and graphite on cream wove paper, 57 x 44.5 cm.
26) John Ruskin, View from the Palazzo Bembo to the Palazzo Grimani, Venice, 1870, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, pencil and watercolour on paper, 35.3 x 50.8 cm.[22]
27) Vittorio Carpaccio, The Dream of St Ursula, 1495, Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice, tempera on canvas, 274 x 267 cm
28) John Ruskin, Drawing of Carpaccio’s “Dream of St Ursula”, from “The Legend of St Ursula” , 1876, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, watercolour and bodycolour over pencil on paper, 29.4 x 27.6 cm.[23]
29) John Ruskin, Head of St Ursula, from Carpaccio’s “Dream of St Ursula” , 1877, Somerville College, Oxford, watercolour on paper, 57 x 40 cm.[24]
30) John Ruskin, Portrait of Rose La Touche, ? 1861, Ruskin Library, Lancaster, pencil, watercolour and bodycolour.
31) Charles Fairfax Murray, John Ruskin, 1875, Tate Britain, London, watercolour and gouache on paper, 476 x 311 mm.
32) John Ruskin, Study of Verbena in Carpaccio’s “Dream of St Ursula”, Private Collection (Sir Stephen Oliver), 1876-7, watercolour on paper, 37 x 31 cm.[25]
33) John Ruskin, San Giorgio Maggiore, the Basin of St Mark’s and a Balcony of Casa-Contarini-Fasan, 1876, Private Collection, pencil, watercolour, bodycolour, 1876.
34) Vincenzo Catena, (prev. att to Titian), Portrait of Doge Andrea Gritti, 1523-31, National Gallery, London, , oil on canvas, 97.2 x 79.4 cm.
35) Vittore Carpaccio, St George and the Dragon, 1502, Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, Venice, tempera on canvas, 141 x 360 cm.
36) Frederick Hollyer, Photograph of Ruskin, 1894 and Venetian Sunset.
[1]
John Ruskin, Praeterita, ed. Francis O’Gorman (Oxford, 2012), 187.
[2]
Ruskin quoted in John Batchelor, John Ruskin: No Wealth But Life, 2000,
21
[3]
Robert Hewison, Ruskin on Venice, 11.
[4]
Robert Hewison, “Ruskin and the Gothic Revival: his research on Venetian
architecture” in Ruskin’s Artists: Studies in the Victorian Visual Economy,
(Ashgate, 2000), 53-69, 57.
[5] Batchelor,
John Ruskin, 105.
[6]
Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 1. Ruskin’s disquiet with the female body
is well-known, but the carnal may have become more of a problem for Ruskin when
he reviewed Turner’s legacy in the form of drawings and sketches in the
basement of the National Gallery in 1857, some of which were pornographic. See Hewison,
Ruskin on Venice, 254f.
[7] “But
for that porter's opening, I should, have written the Stones of Chamouni,
instead of the Stones of Venice[…] but Tintoret swept me in away into the mare
maggiore of the schools of painting which crowned the power and perished in the
fall of Venice; so forcing me into the study of Venice herself; and through
that into what else I have traced or told of the laws of national strength and
virtue."
[8]
Cited in Colin Harrison and Christopher Newall, The Pre-Raphaelites and
Italy, catalogue, (Ashmoleon Museum, Oxford, 2010).
[9] Hewison,
Ruskin on Venice, 308.
[10] Modern
Painters, Vol 3.
[11]
Hewison, Ruskin on Venice, 266. Hewison considers Ruskin’s account in Praeterita
(1888) the most likely of the sequence of events leading from copying the
Veronese in the galleries to visiting a Protestant church. The autobiography
version has the visit to the church in the morning followed by working on the
Veronese in the afternoon, described more in terms of a spiritual experience than
the service in church. The Veronese has been moved from its original location
and is has now been attributed to Paolo’s brother, Benedetto,(Hewison,269-270).
See also Andrew Tate’s “Archangel Veronese: Ruskin as Protestant spectator” in Ruskin’s Artists, 132-145, 133:
“Ruskin’s inclination to describe moments of inspiration, when confronted with
beauty, in the language of religious conversion was established long before the
Turin crisis.”
[12]
Hewison, Ruskin on Venice, 253.
[13]
Hewison suggest that in some passages on nature and colour in Ruskin’s Modern
Painters are influenced by the contrast between colorito and disegno.
[14]
Hewison, Ruskin on Venice, 276.
[15] The
Pre-Raphaelites and Italy, no. 28.
[16] "This
was intended for a new plate for the Architecture of Venice - partly from
Daguerrotype - and partly from materials - but not from nature - by J.R. for
his Sorella"
recto: inscribed in graphite in upper left "3763
[17] But
for that porter’s opening [the door of the Scuola], I should, have written the
Stones of Chamouni, instead of the Stones of Venice[…] but Tintoret swept me in
away into the mare maggiore of the schools of painting which crowned the power
and perished in the fall of Venice; so forcing me into the study of Venice
herself; and through that into what else I have traced or told of the laws of
national strength and virtue.”
[18] “
I must leave this picture to work its will on the spectator, for it is beyond
all analysis, and above all praise.”
[19] The
Pre-Raphaelites and Italy, no. 26.
[20] The
Pre-Raphaelites and Italy, no. 38. Made on a visit with Holman-Hunt in
1869.
[21] The
Pre-Raphaelites and Italy, no. 39. Made on a visit with Holman-Hunt in 1869.
[22] The
Pre-Raphaelites and Italy, no. 33.
[23] The
Pre-Raphaelites and Italy, no. 41. Made for the Drawing School in Oxford in
1876.
[24] The
Pre-Raphaelites and Italy, no. 42.
[25] The
Pre-Raphaelites and Italy , no. 43: “Last night, St Ursula sent me her
dianthus “out of her bedroom window with her love.” “She sent me the living
dianthus […] but she had sent me also, in the morning, from England, a dried
sprig of the other flower in her window, the sacred vervain.”
