75
could find all the variation of beauty God had seen fit to bestow upon the world.
15
As the critical apparatus of
sight was slowly developed, Ruskin believed it should then be trained upon those forms of art most in accordance with natural beauty and human imperfection (true perfection in creation belonging to God alone).
16
Although he began his aesthetic practice with a passion for painting, Ruskin soon developed an interest in buildings, identifying Venice as the apotheosis of architectural beauty. As Frederic Harrison argued in 1902, “Architecture is by far the most social and national of all the arts; and, more than any other art, is affected by the moral tone dominant in the society that employs it” (66 italics added). This was doubly true for Ruskin. He earnestly and unhesitatingly threw himself at the task of narrativizing the socio-historic code the Venetian buildings provided. In an insightful explication of Ruskin’s methodology, Gerald Bruns describes how, for Ruskin, buildings were “events as well as structures,” “acts as well as objects,” “things done as well as things made,” and that they were informed by “the living intelligences that created them” (912). This last point is most crucial, for the buildings were not seen as mere works of art but as “signs for discourse” (Bruns 914) capable of testifying to the health of the society that created them. Ruskin’s aesthetic vision was informed by the belief that artwork was primarily a mediating influence between 17
two individuals.
For this reason, he viewed art as one of the few phenomena capable of alleviating the
social atomism he so strenuously resisted. Learning to “read” beautiful architecture was an act of communion with the “living intelligences” that had produced these works during fleeting moments of cultural vibrancy: go forth and gaze upon the old cathedral front, where you have smiled so often at the fantastic ignorance of the old sculptors: examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters, and stern statues, anatomiless and rigid; but do not mock them, for they are signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure; but which it must be the first aim of all Europe at this day to reclaim for her children (“Gothic” 163). Once a renewed power of vision had been developed, Ruskin encouraged his readers to develop a mode of criticism “on the same principles as that of a book” (“Gothic” 230), with the very best buildings inspiring like Milton or Dante. Ruskin offers his readers a new hermeneutic model; one intended to valorize architectural signs written in the “moment of plenitude” Bruns describes. He believed this would allow his audience to apprehend the aesthetic impoverishment of the present and read it as a sign of social decay. 15
18
All of his
Influenced by his preference for Natural Theology, the natural form is the alpha and omega of Ruskinian aesthetics. 16 The drive towards perfection in form was something that Ruskin connected with the process of industrialization. He strenuously insisted throughout his life that the desire for perfection was corrosive of human health and happiness. 17 This is in contradistinction to critics who identify the art object itself as the telos of aesthetic practice. 18 When considering the difficulty of this task it must always be kept in mind that Ruskin was positioning himself against the watchword of the nineteenth-century: progress.