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EDITORIAL
Ruskin, our contemporary
In the recent years Ruskin scholarship has produced an impressive amount of new and innovative research and 2013 has again been a prolific year for the dissemination of the Victorian critic’s ideas through books, conference, and exhibitions. Of the many events and publications included in our previous and the current issue, two books have retained our attention. They both testify to the modernity of Ruskin’s thought and to the wealth of research that still lies ahead. One is the Rob Brownell’s Marriage of Inconvenience (Pallas Athene Arts, 2013) which radically challenges commonly held views on Ruskin’s disastrous marriage and sets the record straight as to his private life and personal motives. The other is James Dearden’s The Library of John Ruskin (The Oxford Bibliographical Society, Third Series VII, 2012), which meticulously catalogues the 3000 books or so that Ruskin possessed, read, and sometimes disposed of. What these two books have in common is the way their authors go beyond the historical fact and perceptions, to consider new evidence to prompt new questions and formulate new hypotheses.
The motivation is not historicist: It is not about what Ruskin would think or say but to reflect on the current theoretical relevance of Ruskin’s ideas and thoughts. They address the questions and issues we face in our everyday lives: How to best live and manage our lives? What is the use of a book if it is not connected to the life we are leading? In this issue of L8, we are very pleased to include two papers that demonstrate the intimate link between Ruskin’s ethics and his writingsLaura Gilli’s “Art and Decadence” and Victoria Albritton’s ”Sufficient Muse”. Gilli revisits Ruskin’s ideas on beauty by offering a stimulating analysis of the notion of “ornament”. Starting from Ruskin’s well-known theories on beauty she goes on to demonstrate how beauty, detail, and ornament are interwoven. This leads her to conclude: “The importance that Ruskin ascribes to detailand to ornament expressed through detail – is metaphysical. Ornament comes from detail and spreads through art in its entirety”. In the second part of the paper, Gilli goes on to discuss Ruskin’s distinction between good and bad art, with a particular focus on the use of ornament in architecture, as exemplified by his admiration for Chartres cathedral. She concludes that “[t]he notion of ornament lies outside a mere artistic treatise; in fact, it is the direct expression of a metaphysics of Being and of a more general vision of man and of society,” a statement we find echoed and developed in the second paper featured in this issue. Indeed, Albritton’s paper, titled “Ruskin’s Sufficient Muse,” effectively brings together various threads that point to Ruskin’s forward thinking in terms of what we would today term ecology and sustainability. In the course of her enquiry (which is being developed further for inclusion in a book), Albritton draws a fascinating portrait of Susanna Beever, Ruskin’s neighbour and friend in Brantwood. Through the figure of Beever (who later edited Frondes Agrestes, a selection of texts from Modern Painters), we see how Ruskin’s idea of a “sustainable life,” which was developed in his social writings, was embodied by Susan Beever’s simple rural life. The connection between Ruskin and contemporary concerns for environmental and ethical issues foregrounded in both papers also figure prominently in the forthcoming conferences advertised in this issue.