Wednesday 25 June 2014

Week 10: Ruskin and Venice

Ruskin and the “Paradise of all Cities.”

“The Author of Modern Painters”, 1843, engraving after lost watercolour

J.M.W. Turner, Approach to Venice, ex RA, 1844, NGA, Washington, oil on canvas, 62 x 94 cm. LINK

John Ruskin, The Palazzo-Contarini-Fasan on the Grand Canal, Venice, 1841, Ashmoleon Museum, Oxford, pencil on paper. LINK

 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.

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

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

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. 

“John” Bellini, Frari Triptych, Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice,  1488, oil on panel.

Titian, The Entombment, 1523-26, Museé du Louvre, oil on canvas, 148 x 205 cm.

Tintoretto, The Crucifixion, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice, 1565, oil on canvas.

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.

Charles Fairfax Murray, John Ruskin, 1875, Tate Britain, London, watercolour and gouache on paper, 476 x 311 mm. LINK

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

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

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.

 Vittore Carpaccio, St George and the Dragon, 1502, Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, Venice, tempera on canvas, 141 x 360 cm.


John Ruskin, Portrait of Rose La Touche? 1861, Ruskin Library, Lancaster, pencil, watercolour and bodycolour

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.




[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.”

1 comment:

  1. Great review and one which encourages more analysis. Thank you.

    What Ruskin found most objectionable in Titian and Giorgione was that they made the body the principle subject of painting, views which betray Ruskin’s discomfort with the human body just as much as puritan attitudes towards Catholic art. These views not only tainted his perception of Italian art, they also destroyed his marriage. He would never look at Effie's body or consummate the marriage because (apparently) she had adult body hair. Fair enough if that was what he liked or disliked, but her tried to ruin Effie's life, and by extension Millais'.

    I agree that Ruskin’s disquiet with the female body was 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. Ruskin's destruction of Turner's work for the last decade of the artist's life was nasty and tragic.

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