John William Waterhouse,
La Belle Dame Sans Merci, 1893.
Oil on canvas, 112 x 81 cm.
Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt.
William Holman Hunt,
Two Gentlemen of Verona,
Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus, 1851.
Oil on canvas, 98.5 x 133.3 cm.
Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, Birmingham.
In these works, this authoritative guide, this sovereign of aesthetics committed himself to curing art of bad taste, but on condition of blind obedience; these works so full of analytic acuity and creativity that one could call them poems of art criticism.[10] John Ruskin (for it was he) delighted the English imagination for forty years with his appreciation of the heavens, clouds, woods, waters and rocks, and raised his country progressively to his level of enthusiasm, whose ridiculous but very sincere expression was aestheticism. Understanding from the outset that his compatriots would not understand if he spoke to them of nature and art only in terms of beauty, he spoke to them of truth and goodness, of usefulness, morals, biblical thought, and the curiosities of science. Though he had a single goal, he used many different approaches. He was by turns a scholar, an historian, an anti-papist, an economic moralist, a poet, a botanist and a geologist, and through his charming and learned discourse he attracted even the most resistant Englishmen to the idea of beauty. All of the winding paths in his historical promenade brought them inevitably to the same point, which was the social mission of art and its supremacy over all other things. This is the man who would protest against railways because they were ugly, who would forgive popes because they loved beauty, who would found aesthetic festivals in convents and museums in working-class neighbourhoods, and who would resurrect the guilds of the Middle Ages because they were picturesque. He would create a workshop in Westmoreland with thirty women working on spinning wheels modelled after those of the Campanile de Giotto, and a workshop in Laxey on the Isle of Man where the black wool from the island’s sheep was woven without the help of any modern machine, because manual work developed the muscles and made the human body more beautiful. Examples of Ruskin’s aesthetic despotism and the submission of his admirers are known throughout England. One day, the great aesthetician declared that he did not understand why apple trees in bloom were never depicted in paintings, since nothing was more “aesthetic” than a blooming apple tree. The following year, the walls of the exhibitions and galleries were covered with apple trees in bloom. Another time, a woman was filled with the desire to copy nature and asked him for advice in choosing a model. “I will send it to you,” he responded, and a short while later she found a cart at her doorstep containing an enormous paving stone. She was not astonished, and began meticulously studying this stone.
Arthur Hughes,
The Knight of the Sun, undated.
Oil on panel, 28 x 39 cm.
Private Collection.
Besides this anecdote, there are many other examples of the punctuality with which the prescriptions of this sovereign of aesthetics were followed. Indeed, a tourist who follows the injunctions of Mornings in Florence when visiting the city of Savonarola could leave the banks of the Arno having seen neither the Tribune, nor the Palazzo Pitti, nor the Palazzo Vecchio, nor the Loggia, nor San Marco, nor most of the other things for which one generally visits Florence. But he will have shivered behind the funerary monument of the marquise Strozzi Ridolfi in the cloister of Santa Maria Novella, and ruined his eyesight in a dark chapel of Santa Croce, and it would be a miracle if, while contemplating the Campanile from all directions, exposed to the air with his feet in the mud, he didn’t get a stiff neck. Now, these aesthetic stations were shown to around thirty English men and women, for six days in a row, in the order prescribed by Ruskin. These aesthetes could be found peering at the rays of sunlight in the Bardi chapel in front of Giotto as prescribed in Book III, and scrutinising the narrow door in the fresco The Triumph of Saint Thomas Aquinas. They were seen running from Santa Maria Novella to the Uffizi at a quarter past eleven, just as Ruskin desired, and hurrying from the Duomo to the Spanish Chapel’s Chiostro Verde in order to compare the effects of the vaults, without losing a moment looking right or left down the street that they were crossing to avoid weakening the impression on the eyes. Finally, they were seen at the tombstone of Galileo Galilei, at the entrance of Santa Croce. And in the solemn shadow of the temple, listening to the profound and eloquent words of this great admirer of beauty, one experiences a striking sensation. One forgets that this visit is part of an immutable Cook’s tour. The magic of the great writer makes it again possible to see these places as part of an aesthetic pilgrimage. One seems to see Brother Egidio and Saint Louis moving silently toward one another in the depths of the old chapel, as in the legend where they see one another for the first time, embrace without exchanging a single word, and leave one another forever...
At the time when the young Hunt read his first work, John Ruskin was not yet a universally-known author whose books were reproduced by the million, but his keen words already carried authority. However, this authority was only honorary; he was listened to but not followed. To create a revolution in painting, even the most eloquent criticism is not sufficient: one needs painters to do the job. John Ruskin did not find them close to him, and scanned the horizon to no avail, wondering if a few new men might appear whom he could make into his disciples.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
The Wedding of St. George and Princess Sabra, 1857.
Watercolour on paper, 36.5 x 36.5 cm.
Tate Britain, London.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
How Sir Galahad, Sir Bors and Sir Percival
Were Fed with the Sanct Grael; but Sir Percival’s
Sister Died by the Way, 1864.
Watercolour on paper, 29.2 x 41.9 cm.
Tate Britain, London.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
Sir Galahad at the Ruined Chapel, 1859.
Watercolour on paper, 29.3 x 33.9 cm.
Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, Birmingham.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
Before the Battle, 1858, retouched in 1862.
Transparent and opaque watercolour on paper,