by Ben Lima | 6 May 2010 | Architecture, Theory
Robert Hewison’s Ruskin on Venice has been reviewed by Steve Donoghue, Jonathan Glancey, Jonathan Wright, and Kevin Jackson. The productive tension between Ruskin’s Protestant moral sense, and his sensual affection for the visual arts, resulted in a distinctive prose variously termed “idiosyncratic,” “incomparable,” “magnificent,” and “gorgeous, insanely overwrought.”
Jackson:
For those interested in Ruskin’s intellectual development, perhaps the most remarkable aspect of his life is to see how he was led, almost against his will, from art criticism, to the study of architecture, to social criticism. Most scholars agree, and Hewison confirms, that it was Ruskin’s investigation of Venetian architecture that obliged him — somewhat against his own inclinations — to preach unpopular social gospels to his already large audience.
Donoghue:
Ruskin On Venice does a gorgeous job reproducing a vast number of Ruskin’s watercolors and pencil sketches from the lifetime of visits he paid to Venice – the summary effect is almost sufficient to call for a reassessment of status as an artist, quite apart from his ever having written a word.
Wright:
Talk of technique and, if you were lucky, a smattering of biographical background had defined art criticism since the Renaissance. Ruskin was more interested in analysing the viewer’s response. He lapped up the collision of past and present and revelled in the intersection between the concrete and the symbolic.
Glancey:
…Ruskin’s affair with Venice was also to give us the critic’s social commentary that was to affect British life after his death in the guise of national insurance, national health, universal free education and even the National Trust. Ruskin’s gothic Venice was built, as he saw it, by craftsmen working creatively for a moral, purposeful republic aiming for the best in all things. Britain could, and did – through Ruskin’s eyes – learn from it.
I find Ruskin stimulating on most any topic. I particularly recommend Modern Painters, which has great insights into art, even though he often seems much more interested such things in geology and cloud formation. His moral sense was indeed formidable, not just when it came to Whistler but also Canaletto (“The mannerism of Canaletto is the most degraded that I know in the whole range of art”) and indeed the whole of landscape painting: “And let it be understood that whenever hereafter I speak depreciatingly of the old masters as a body … I refer only to Claude, Gaspar Poussin, Salvator Rosa, Cuyp, Berghem, Both, Ruysdael, Hobbema, Teniers (in his landscapes), P. Potter, Canaletto, and the various Van somethings and Back somethings, more especially and malignantly those who have libelled the sea…. No doubt can, I think, be reasonably entertained as to the utter inutility of all that has been hitherto accomplished by the painters of landscape. No moral end has been answered, no permanent good effected, by any of their works … Landscape art has never taught us one deep or holy lesson; it has not recorded that which is fleeting, nor penetrated that which was hidden, nor interpreted that which was obscure; it has never made us feel the wonder, nor the power, nor the glory of the universe … That which ought to have been a witness to the omnipotence of God, has become an exhibition of the dexterity of man.”
I have a problem with Ruskin’s morality, especially when it gets out of hand and leads to daft pronouncements on Rosa, Guido Reni et al.
His importance to Venice was brought home to me by a chat with the guide of San Giobbe- a church that Ruskin admired for its architectural restraint- last month. The guide told me that Ruskin was very important to the Venetians because he wrote of a Venice that is no longer there.
One reviewer mentioned Carlyle in comparison. As a non-19th-c-specialist, I’m taken aback by the impassioned, florid tone that is characteristic of both. I think it’s fair to say that most 20th-c. critics and historians don’t write this way. But I’m curious about why that is. Academic professionalization? An effort to emulate the exact sciences (neutrality, objectivity, etc.)? A need to be seen to be thoroughly demystified and self-critical, post Freud Marx Nietzsche?
I would actually be interested to read a review of Olafur Eliasson or the Burj Dubai that adopted a tone similar to the quotations below.
* * *
Ruskin:
Deep-hearted, majestic, terrible as the sea, – the men of Venice moved in sway of power and war; pure as her pillars of alabaster, stood her mothers and maidens; from foot to brow, all noble, walked her knights; the low bronzed gleaming of sea-rusted armour shot angrily under their blood-red mantle-folds.
http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/the-nautilus/
Carlyle:
Dance on, ye foolish ones ; ye sought not wisdom, neither have ye found it. Ye and your fathers have sown the wind, ye shall reap the whirlwind. Was it not, from of old, written : /The wages of sin is death/ ?
http://books.google.com/books?id=7YgHAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA49