RUSKIN’S
ECOLOGIES
FIGURES OF RELATION FROM
MODERN PAINTERS TO THE
STORM-CLOUD
EDITED BY KELLY FREEMAN AND THOMAS HUGHES
RUSKIN’S
ECOLOGIES:
FIGURES OF
RELATION
FROM MODERN
PAINTERS TO THE
STORM-CLOUD
Edited by:
Kelly Freeman
Thomas Hughes
Ruskin’s Ecologies:
Figures of Relation from Modern Painters to The Storm-Cloud
Edited by Kelly Freeman and Thomas Hughes
With contributions by:
Kate Flint
Thomas Hughes
Moran Sheleg
Timothy Chandler
Stephen Kite
Kelly Freeman
Jeremy Melius
Giulia Martina Weston
Nicholas Robbins
Polly Gould
Courtney Skipton
Stephen Bann
Lawrence Gasquet
Ryan Roark
ISBN 978-1-907485-13-8
Series Editor: Alixe Bovey
Managing Editor: Maria Mileeva
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Acknowledgements
This book originated in collegiate relations
between two London art history departments, at
University College London and The Courtauld
Institute of Art. Our collaboration resulted in a
two-day conference hosted by both institutions
in December 2017, during which we were pleased
to welcome many international speakers. We
remain deeply grateful to the Ruskin Society for
a grant which made the conference possible, and
we would like to thank the UCL History of Art
Department (Past Imperfect Seminar Series) and
the Research Forum at The Courtauld and all the
speakers and attendees for making it a productive
and pleasurable occasion. In particular, at UCL
we are grateful to Mechtild Fend and Rose Marie
San Juan, and at The Courtauld to Alixe Bovey
and Fern Insh. The book that has evolved from
this conference is a testament to what collegiate
relations can help one to achieve. At its heart, this
book is all about relations and relationships, with
each other and with Ruskin.
As the book continued to evolve, we
incurred many other debts. We would like to thank
wholeheartedly several institutions and colleagues
for their help. The Ruskin—Library, Museum
and Research Centre, Lancaster University kindly
devoted a term’s programme of the Ruskin Seminar
to us, culminating in a series of seminars and in a
day-long workshop. We sincerely thank them for
the financial and intellectual support they have
offered this project, in particular Sandra Kemp and
Christopher Donaldson. The British Association
of Victorian Studies kindly allowed us to host a
panel, ‘Renewing Ruskin’s Ecologies’, at its annual
conference in Dundee in 2019 and we would
like to thank attendees for their comments and
enthusiasm. We are particularly grateful to Dinah
Birch, president of BAVS, for her contributions at
this panel and for her encouragement.
We are grateful to colleagues at The
Courtauld Library and The London Library.
Furthermore, at The Courtauld we would also like
to thank Karin Kyburz, Picture Researcher, for
her help in sourcing illustrations for the book. At
Courtauld Books Online we would like to thank
Mollie Arbuthnot for diligent copyediting, Grace
Williams for beautiful design work, Maria Mileeva
for overseeing the project, and Alixe Bovey for her
stewardship and support.
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Preface Kelly Freeman and Thomas Hughes
Introduction: ‘There Is No Wealth But Life’ Kelly Freeman and Thomas Hughes
1. ‘Ruskin and Lichen’ Kate Flint
2. ‘The Balcony: Queer Temporality in The Stones of Venice and Proust’ Thomas Hughes
3. ‘A Pattern in Time: Tracing the Arabesque from Ruskin to Bridget Riley’ Moran Sheleg
4. ‘Feeling Gothic: Affect and Aesthetics in Ruskin’s Architectural Theory’ Timothy Chandler
5. ‘From Earth Veil to Wall Veil: Ruskin, Morris, Webb, and the Arts and Crafts Surface’
Stephen Kite
6. ‘The Osteological Line’ Kelly Freeman
7. ‘Forms of Intermediate Being’ Jeremy Melius
8. ‘Rosa’s Fall: From Picturesque to Ruskin’s Anti-Turner, Salvator Rosa in Victorian Britain’
Giulia Martina Weston
9. ‘Ruskin, Whistler, and the Climate of Art in 1884’ Nicholas Robbins
10. ‘Molar Heights and Molecular Lowlands: Scale and Imagination in Ruskin and John
Tyndall’ Polly Gould
11. ‘Seeing Stars of Light: Plate Three of The Seven Lamps of Architecture’
Courtney Skipton Long
12. “‘Stray Flowers”? The Role of Illustration in the Critical Argument of The Stones of
Venice’ Stephen Bann
13. ‘“That Golden Stain of Time”: The Ethics of The Dust from Ruskin to Jorge OteroPailos’ Lawrence Gasquet
14. ‘The Afterlife of Dying Buildings: Ruskin and Preservation in the Twenty-First Century’
Ryan Roark
Notes on Contributors
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Chapter 1
Fig. 0.1
John Ruskin, Study of Gneiss Rock, Glenfinlas
(1853–4). Lampblack, bodycolour, and pen
and ink over pencil on wove paper, with some
scratching out, 47.8 × 32.7 cm. Ashmolean
Museum, Oxford.
Photo: © Ashmolean Museum, University of
Oxford.
Fig. 1.4
John Brett, Val d’Aosta (1858). Oil on canvas,
87.6 cm × 68 cm. Private collection.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Fig. 1.5
John Brett, Carthillon Cliffs (1878). Oil on
canvas, 45.7 × 91.4 cm. Royal Holloway,
University of London.
Photo: Royal Holloway, University of London.
Fig. 0.2
John Everett Millais, John Ruskin (1853–4).
Oil on canvas, 71.3 × 60.8 cm. Ashmolean
Museum, Oxford.
Photo: © Ashmolean Museum, University of
Oxford.
Fig. 1.6
John Everett Millais, John Ruskin (1853–4).
Oil on canvas, 71.3 × 60.8 cm. Ashmolean
Museum, Oxford.
Photo: © Ashmolean Museum, University of
Oxford.
Fig. 0.3
J. C. Armytage after John Ruskin, The Vine:
Free and in Service. Engraving, reproduced in
The Stones of Venice 2 (1853). Library Edition,
Plate Six, facing 10.115.
Fig. 1.7
John Ruskin, Study of Gneiss Rock, Glenfinlas
(1853–4). Lampblack, bodycolour, and
pen and ink over graphite on wove paper,
with some scratching out, 47.8 × 32.7 cm.
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
Photo: © Ashmolean Museum, University of
Oxford.
Fig. 1.1
John Ruskin, Study of Foreground Material.
Finished Sketch in Water-Colour, from Nature
(1871). Watercolour and bodycolour over
graphite on wove paper, 19 × 21.4 cm.
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
Photo: © Ashmolean Museum, University of
Oxford.
Fig. 1.2
John Ruskin, Study of a Piece of Brick, to show
Cleavage in Burnt Clay (c.1871). Watercolour
and bodycolour over graphite on wove paper,
21.9 × 15.4 cm. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
Photo: © Ashmolean Museum, University of
Oxford.
Fig. 1.3
Henry Alexander Bowler, The Doubt: ‘Can
these Dry Bones Live?’ (1855). Oil on canvas,
61 × 50.8 cm. Tate, London.
Photo: © Tate.
Fig. 1.8
John William Inchbold, The Moorland (Dewarstone, Dartmoor) (1854). Oil on canvas, 35.6
cm × 53.3 cm. Tate, London.
Photo: © Tate.
Fig. 1.9
John Everett Millais, A Huguenot, on St
Bartholomew’s Day, Refusing to Shield Himself
from Danger by Wearing the Roman Catholic
Badge (1851–2). Oil on canvas, 92.71 cm ×
64.13 cm. Christie Manson and Woods Ltd.,
London.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Fig. 1.10
John Everett Millais, The Proscribed Royalist,
1651 (1852–3). Oil on canvas, 102.8 cm ×
73.6 cm. Private collection.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Chapter 2
Fig. 2.1
Ruskin illustrated the section of Stones 2 on
Gothic windows with this steel engraving
of a balcony: J. C. Armytage after two
daguerreotypes, Windows of the Fifth Order.
Engraving, reproduced in The Stones of Venice 2
(London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1853). Plate
XVIII, facing p. 266.
Fig. 2.2
John Ruskin and John Hobbs, Venice.
Palazzo Priuli. Window detail (c.1849–50).
Daguerreotype, 7.5 × 10 cm. The Penrith
Collection, K. and J. Jacobson, UK.
Photo: © K. and J. Jacobson.
Fig. 2.3
Facade, Palazzo Ducale. Albumen print
photograph, 26 × 35 cm. Conway Library, The
Courtauld, London.
Photo: The Courtauld.
Fig. 2.4
Hervé Simon, The Ducal Palace, Venice.
Photograph.
Photo: Flickr. © Hervé Simon.
Fig. 2.5
John Ruskin and John Hobbs, The Ducal
Palace south-west angle with Austrian soldiers (c.
1849–52). Daguerreotype, 10.2 x 7.6 cm. The
Penrith Collection, K. and J. Jacobson, UK.
Photo: © K. and J. Jacobson.
Fig. 2.6
Carlo Naya, Basilica di San Marco. Albumen
print photograph, 25 × 32 cm. Conway
Library, The Courtauld, London.
Photo: The Courtauld.
Fig. 2.7
John Ruskin and John Hobbs, Venice. St
Mark’s. South facade. Upper arcade (c. 1850–2).
Daguerreotype, 94 x 117 mm. The Penrith
Collection, K. and J. Jacobson, UK.
Photo: © K. and J. Jacobson.
Fig. 2.8
Judy Dean, St Mark’s Basilica, Venice.
Photograph.
Photo: Flickr. © Judy Dean.
Fig. 2.9
John Ruskin and John Hobbs, Venice. St
Mark’s. Principal facade. Central porch. (c.
1850). Daguerreotype, 10.1 × 7.7 cm. The
Penrith Collection, K. and J. Jacobson, UK.
Photo: © K. and J. Jacobson.
Fig. 2.10
John Ruskin, The Ducal Palace—Bird’s-Eye
View. Woodcut, reproduced in The Stones of
Venice 2 (1853). Library Edition, figure 37,
10.331.
Chapter 3
Fig. 3.1
William Simpson, Interior of the Crystal Palace
(c.1851). Watercolour, 71 × 99 cm. Victoria
and Albert Museum, London.
Photo: © Victoria and Albert Museum.
Fig. 3.2
Peter Halley, Rob and Jack (1990). Acrylic
paint on canvas, 249 × 482.5 × 9.5 cm. Tate,
London.
Photo: © Peter Halley, courtesy of the artist
and Tate.
Fig. 3.3
After John Ruskin, The Ducal Palace,
Renaissance Capitals of the Loggia (1849–50).
Watercolour over graphite, 46 × 29 cm.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Photo: © Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Fig. 3.4
Louis Haghe after David Roberts, Grand
Portico of the Temple of Philae—Nubia (1846).
Colour lithograph printed in Egypt & Nubia
From Drawings Made on the Spot by David
Roberts R. A. with Historical Descriptions by
William Brockedon, F. R. S. Lithographed by
Louis Haghe, three volumes (London: F. G.
Moon, 1846–9), vol. 1. Library of Congress,
Washington DC.
Photo: © Library of Congress Prints and
Photographs Division.
Fig. 3.5
F. Bedford after Owen Jones, Egyptian
Ornament No. 3: Capitals of Columns, Showing
the Varied Applications of the Lotus and Papyrus.
Chromolithograph, reproduced in Owen
Jones, The Grammar of Ornament (London:
Day and Son, 1856), Plate Six.
Photo: © National Museums of Scotland.
Fig. 3.6
John Frederick Lewis, The Siesta (1876).
Oil paint on canvas, 88.6 × 111.1 cm. Tate,
London.
Photo: © Tate.
Fig. 3.7
Henri Matisse, Harmony in Yellow (1928). Oil
on canvas, 88 × 88 cm. Private collection.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Fig. 3.8
Bridget Riley, Hesitate (1964). Emulsion on
board, 106.7 × 112.4 cm. Tate, London.
Photo: © Bridget Riley 2020. All rights
reserved. Courtesy of Bridget Riley Archive.
Fig. 3.9
Bridget Riley, Winter Palace (1981). Oil on
linen, 212.1 × 185.5 cm. Leeds Art Gallery,
Leeds.
Photo: © Bridget Riley 2020. All rights
reserved. Courtesy of Bridget Riley Archive.
Fig. 3.10
Bridget Riley, The Curve Paintings (1961–
2014). Installation view: from left, Rajasthan
(2012) and Lagoon 2 (1997).
Photo: Peter White. © Bridget Riley 2020. All
rights reserved.
Chapter 4
Fig. 4.1.
J. M. W. Turner, Melrose Abbey (c.1822).
Watercolour on paper, 19.7 × 13.5 cm. The
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown MA.
Photo: The Clark Art Institute.
Fig. 4.2.
John Ruskin, The South Transept, Melrose
(1838). Pencil on paper, 50.5 × 35.5 cm.
The Ruskin—Library, Museum and Research
Centre, University of Lancaster, Bailrigg.
Photo: Google Arts and Culture.
Chapter 5
Fig. 5.1
Courtyard and principal facade of Casa dell’
Angelo, Rio di Canonica, Venice (also called
Ca’ Soranzo). Photograph.
Photo: © Cameraphoto Arte.
Fig. 5.2
Giovanni Mansueti, Miracle of the Relic of
the Holy Cross in Campo San Lio (1494).
Tempera on canvas, 322 × 463 cm. Gallerie
dell’Accademia, Venice (cat. 564).
Photo: © G.A.VE Archivio fotografico—‘su
concessione del Ministero dei beni e delle
attività culturali e del turismo—Gallerie
dell’Accademia di Venezia’.
Fig. 5.3
R. P. Cuff after John Ruskin, Linear and
Surface Gothic. Line engraving, reproduced in
The Stones of Venice 2 (1853). Library Edition,
Plate Twelve, facing 10.262.
Fig. 5.4
Guillaume de Loris and Jean de Meun, Roman
de la Rose, ‘Lutenist and singers in a walled
garden’ (c.1490–1500). British Library,
London (cat. Harley 4425 f12v).
Photo: © The British Library Board.
Fig. 5.5
William Morris and Philip Webb, Design
for Trellis Wallpaper (1862). Pencil, ink, and
watercolour on paper, 66.4 × 61 cm. William
Morris Gallery, Walthamstow, London.
Photo: © Paul Tucker for William Morris
Gallery, Waltham Forest Council.
Fig. 5.6
Stephen Kite, Perspective Reconstruction of
Philip Webb’s 1864 Design to Extend Red House
into a ‘Palace of Art’.
Photo: © Stephen Kite.
Fig. 5.7
Stephen Kite, Hortus Conclusus analysis of Red
House ‘Palace of Art’.
Photo: © Stephen Kite.
Fig. 5.8
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Arthur’s Tomb (1855).
Watercolour with bodycolour and graphite, 24
× 38.2 cm. British Museum, London.
Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum.
Fig. 5.9
F. H. New, Long Drawing Room at Kelmscott
House. Woodcut, reproduced in J. W. Mackail,
The Life of William Morris, two volumes
[1899] (London: Longmans, Green, & Co.,
1901), vol. 1, facing p. 372.
Fig. 5.10
Bernard Lemere, A corner of the second
drawing-room, decorated by William
Morris. Photograph, reproduced in The Art
Journal (May 1893), p. 141.
Chapter 6
Fig. 6.1
John Ruskin, Study of a Lettuce Thistle, Diary
(1854). Ink on paper, 19.7 × 15.5 cm. The
Ruskin—Library, Museum and Research
Centre, University of Lancaster, Bailrigg.
Photo: © The Ruskin—Library, Museum and
Research Centre, University of Lancaster.
Fig. 6.2
John Ruskin, Tree Studies (c.1845–55). Pencil,
black ink, ink wash, and bodycolour on blue
paper, 55.2 × 38 cm. The Ruskin—Library,
Museum and Research Centre, University of
Lancaster, Bailrigg.
Photo: © The Ruskin—Library, Museum and
Research Centre, University of Lancaster.
Fig. 6.3
Frontispiece to A Compendium of Osteology
(1833). Printed in George Witt, A
Compendium of Osteology: Being a Systematic
Treatise of the Bones of the Human Body
(London: Longman & Co., 1833).
Photo: National Collections Centre, Science
Museum Group.
Fig. 6.4
R. Hart, Diagram of Gothic Buttressing
(1840). Reproduced in Alfred Bartholomew,
‘Of Abutments’ in Specifications for Practical
Architecture (London: J. Williams & Co.,
1840), part one, chapter 52, section 463,
unpaginated.
Fig. 6.5
R. P. Cuff after John Ruskin, Ornaments
from Rouen, St Lô, and Venice. Engraving,
reproduced in The Seven Lamps of Architecture
(1849). Library Edition, Plate One, facing
8.52.
Fig. 6.6
R. P. Cuff after John Ruskin, Window from the
Ca’ Foscari, Venice. Engraving, reproduced in
The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849). Library
Edition, Plate Eight, facing 8.132.
Fig. 6.7
R. P. Cuff after John Ruskin, Abstract Lines.
Line block, reproduced in The Stones of Venice
1 (1851). Library Edition, Plate Seven, facing
9.268.
Photo: The Courtauld Institute of Art.
Fig. 6.8
John Ruskin, Contour of the Gorge of Ardon, in
the Valais (figure 17) and Order of the Beds in
the Same (figure 18). Woodcuts, reproduced
in Modern Painters 4 (1856). Library Edition,
figure 17, 6.193; figure 18, 6.194.
Fig. 6.9
G. Allen after John Ruskin, Acanthoid Leaves.
Steel engraving, reproduced in Proserpina 1
(1875). Library Edition, Plate Twelve, facing
25.289.
Fig. 6.10
G. Allen after John Ruskin, Crested Leaves:
Lettuce-Thistle. Steel engraving, reproduced
in Proserpina 1 (1875). Library Edition, Plate
Thirteen, facing 25.290.
Chapter 7
Fig. 7.1
Joseph Mallord William Turner, Lausanne from
the North-East (1836). Val d’Aosta sketchbook,
folio 48 recto. Pencil on white wove paper,
11.3 × 19 cm. Tate, London (cat. Turner
Bequest CCXCIII 48).
Photo: © Tate.
Fig. 7.2
After John Ruskin, Turner’s ‘Memoranda’ Sketch
of Lausanne in the National Gallery. Woodcut,
reproduced in Modern Painters 5 (1860).
Library Edition, figure 98, facing 7.242.
Fig. 7.3
After John Ruskin, Elementary Type of Tree
Plant, as it will be in a Second Year. Woodcut,
reproduced in Modern Painters 5 (1860).
Library Edition, figure 47, 7.75.
Fig. 7.4
After John Ruskin, Modifications of the
Elementary Type during Subsequent Growth.
Woodcut, reproduced in Modern Painters 5
(1860). Library Edition, figure 48, 7.75.
Fig. 7.14
After John Ruskin, A Birch Bud. Woodcut,
reproduced in Modern Painters 5 (1860).
Library Edition, figure 70, 7.99.
Fig. 8.8
Salvator Rosa, A Group of Broken Trees (1640–
50). Pen and brown ink on paper, 40.2 × 28.5
cm. The British Museum, London.
Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum.
Chapter 8
Fig. 7.5
After John Ruskin, Modifications of the
Elementary Type during Subsequent Growth.
Woodcut, reproduced in Modern Painters 5
(1860). Library Edition, figure 49, 7.76.
Fig. 7.6
After John Ruskin, Branch from Salvator Rosa’s
‘Apollo and the Sybil’ (figure 62) and Branch
from Turner’s ‘Aske Hall’ (figure 63). Woodcuts,
reproduced in Modern Painters 5 (1860).
Library Edition, figures 62 and 63, 7.93.
Fig. 7.7
Paolo Veronese, The Madonna of the Cuccina
Family (c.1571). Oil on canvas, 167 × 416 cm.
Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden.
Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Staatliche
Kunstsammlungen Dresden / Herbert
Boswank / Art Resource, NY.
Fig. 7.8
Detail of figure 7.7
Fig. 7.9
Detail of figure 7.7
Fig. 7.10
Detail of figure 7.7.
Fig. 7.11
Detail of figure 7.7.
Fig. 7.12
John Ruskin, Copy of a Part of Paolo Veronese’s
‘Family Group’ at Dresden. Photogravure after
drawing, reproduced in Modern Painters 5
(1860). Library Edition, Plate F, facing 7.290.
Fig. 7.13
John Ruskin, Copy of the Head of a Boy, from
Veronese’s ‘Cucina Family’ (1859). Pencil, ink,
ink wash, and bodycolour, 28 × 22.3 cm.
The Ruskin—Library, Museum & Research
Center, University of Lancaster, Bailrigg.
Photo: © The Ruskin—Library, Museum and
Research Center, University of Lancaster.
Chapter 9
Fig. 8.1
Salvator Rosa, The Death of Empedocles
(c.1666). Oil on canvas, 135 × 99 cm. Private
collection, England.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Fig. 8.2
Salvator Rosa, The Prodigal Son (c.1650).
Oil on canvas, 253.5 × 201 cm. The State
Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Fig. 8.3
Salvator Rosa, Democritus in Meditation
(1651). Oil on canvas, 344 × 214 cm. Statens
Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Fig. 9.1
John Ruskin, Ice Clouds over Coniston Old
Man (c.1880). Watercolour, 12.5 × 17
cm. The Ruskin—Library, Museum and
Research Centre, University of Lancaster,
Bailrigg.
Photo: © The Ruskin—Library, Museum
and Research Centre, University of
Lancaster.
Fig. 9.2
J. Emslie after John Ruskin, Cloud Perspective
(Rectilinear). Engraving, reproduced in Modern
Painters 5 (1860). Library Edition, Plate SixtyFour, facing 7.152.
Fig. 8.4
Salvator Rosa, Diogenes Throwing Away his
Bowl (1652). Oil on canvas, 344 × 212.5 cm.
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Fig. 9.3
John Ruskin, Sunset at Herne Hill (1876).
Watercolour, 29.2 × 40.6 cm. Ruskin
Museum, Coniston.
Photo: Ruskin Museum / Bridgeman
Images.
Fig. 8.5
Joseph Mallord William Turner, Glaucus and
Scylla (1841). Oil on canvas, 78.3 × 77.5 cm.
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Fig. 9.4
Albert Goodwin, Sunset in the Manufacturing
District (1883). Watercolour, 57.2 × 78.8 cm.
Private collection.
Photo: Bridgeman Images.
Fig. 8.6
Joseph Mallord William Turner, Undine
Giving the Ring to Masaniello, Fisherman of
Naples (1846–7). Oil on canvas, 79.1 × 79.1
cm. Tate, London.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Fig. 9.5
James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Sunrise; Grey
and Gold (1883–4). Watercolour, 17.6 × 12.7
cm. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.
Photo: © National Gallery of Ireland.
Fig. 8.7
John Ruskin, Trees in a Lane, Perhaps at
Ambleside (1847). Graphite, black and brown
ink, and ink wash on white paper, 44.5 ×
57.2 cm. The Ruskin—Library, Museum and
Research Centre, University of Lancaster,
Bailrigg.
Photo: © The Ruskin—Library, Museum and
Research Centre, University of Lancaster.
Fig. 9.6
James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Nocturne
in Grey and Gold—Piccadilly (1881–3).
Watercolour, 22.2 × 29.2 cm. National Gallery
of Ireland, Dublin.
Photo: © National Gallery of Ireland.
Fig. 9.7
James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Velarium
(1887–8). Pencil, pen, brown ink,
and watercolour, 25.3 × 17.7 cm. The
Hunterian, Glasgow.
Photo: © The Hunterian, University of
Glasgow.
Chapter 10
Fig. 10.1
J. C. Armytage after John Ruskin, The Aiguille
Blaitière. Engraving, reproduced in Modern
Painters 4 (1856). Library Edition, Plate
Thirty-One, facing 6.230.
Fig. 10.2
Edward Whymper, The Weisshorn from
the Riffel. Engraving, reproduced in John
Tyndall, Hours of Exercise in the Alps (London:
Longmans & Co., 1871). Facing p. 91.
Fig. 10.3
Polly Gould, Alpine Architecture: Dent du
Géant (2017). Watercolour on paper, 38 × 58
cm.
Photo: © Polly Gould 2020. All rights
reserved.
Fig. 10.4
Polly Gould, Alpine Architecture: Piz Roseg
(2017). Watercolour on paper, 38 × 58 cm.
Photo: © Polly Gould 2020. All rights
reserved.
Fig. 10.5
Polly Gould, Paper Architecture: Matterhorn
(2020). Inkjet print on paper and thread, 30 ×
42 cm.
Photo: © Polly Gould 2020. All rights
reserved.
Fig. 10.6
Polly Gould, Paper Architecture: Mont Blanc
(2020). Inkjet print on paper and thread, 30 ×
42 cm. Photo: © Polly Gould 2020. All rights
reserved.
Fig. 10.7
Polly Gould, The Crystal Chain: habit/refuge
(2020). Paper, inkjet print, watercolour,
thread, and mannequins, dimensions variable.
Photo: © Polly Gould 2020. All rights
reserved.
Fig. 10.8
Detail of figure 10.7.
Fig. 10.9
Polly Gould, The Crystal Chain: habit/refuge
(2020). Paper, inkjet print, watercolour,
thread, and mannequins, dimensions variable.
Photo: Oskar Proctor. © Polly Gould 2020.
All rights reserved.
Chapter 11
Fig. 11.1
R. P. Cuff after John Ruskin, Traceries from
Caen, Bayeux, Rouen, and Beauvais. Engraving,
reproduced in The Seven Lamps of Architecture
(1849). Library Edition, Plate Three, facing
8.88.
Fig. 11.6
After Edward Augustus Freeman, Geometrical
Tracery. Engraving, reproduced in Edward
Augustus Freeman, An Essay on the Origin and
Development of Window Tracery in England
(Oxford and London: J. H. Parker, 1851).
Plate One, facing p. 8.
Fig. 11.7
Printed by B. T. Batsford after (Sir) Banister
Fletcher, English Gothic Examples. Reproduced
in Banister Fletcher, A History of Architecture
on the Comparative Method of the Student,
Craftsman, and Amateur [1890], second
edition (London: B. T. Batsford, High
Holborn, 1905). Plate Seventeen, facing
p. 341.
Chapter 12
Fig. 11.2
W. Radclyffe after Thomas Rickman, Plate
Five. Engraving, reproduced in Thomas
Rickman, An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles
of Architecture in England (London: John
Henry Parker, 1817). Facing p. 113.
Fig. 11.3
After John Britton, A Chronological Series of
Twenty-Six Windows. Engraving, reproduced
in John Britton, Chronological History and
Graphic Illustrations of Christian Architecture
in England (London: Longman, Rees, Orme,
Brown, and Green, 1826). Plates Eighty-Three
and Eighty-Four.
Fig. 11.4
After Robert Willis, To Explain the Probable
History of Tracery and the System of its
Mouldings. Engraving, reproduced in Robert
Willis, Remarks on Architecture of the Middle
Ages, Especially of Italy (Cambridge: J. & J. J.
Deighton, 1835). Plate Ten.
Fig. 11.5
Edmund Sharpe, Origin of Tracery; Illustrated
by a Series of Two-Light Windows. Steel
engraving, reproduced in Edmund Sharpe, A
Treatise on the Rise and Progress of Decorated
Window Tracery in England (London: John
Van Voorst, 1849). Plate B, facing p. 19.
Windows: 1. and 2. St. Giles, Oxford; 3.
and 4. Netley; 5. Winchester; 6. St. Cross; 7.
Grasby, 8. Dowsby; 9. Etton; 10. Scotton; 11.
Charlton-on-Otmoor; 12. Chiselbourne.
Fig. 12.1
John Ruskin, Arch from the Façade of the
Church of San Michele at Lucca. Soft-ground
etching, reproduced in The Seven Lamps of
Architecture (London: Smith, Elder, and Co.,
1849). Plate VI, facing p. 84.
Fig. 12.2
John Ruskin, Window from the Ca’ Foscari.
Soft-ground etching, reproduced in The Seven
Lamps of Architecture (London: Smith, Elder,
and Co., 1849). Plate VIII, facing p. 88.
Fig. 12.3
John Ruskin, Balcony in the Campo
St. Benedetto, Venice. Soft-ground etching,
reproduced in The Seven Lamps of Architecture
(London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1849). Plate
XI, facing p. 125.
Fig. 12.4
John Ruskin, Tracery from the Campanile
of Giotto, at Florence. Soft-ground etching,
reproduced in The Seven Lamps of Architecture
(London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1849). Plate
IX, facing p. 94.
Fig. 12.5
John Ruskin, title page from The Seven Lamps
of Architecture (London: George Allen &
Sons, The Popular Ruskin Edition, Sixtyfifth Thousand, 1907); with frontispiece by
J. C. Armytage photographically reduced
steel engraving after drawing by Ruskin based
on a daguerreotype (originally published as
frontispiece to The Seven Lamps of Architecture,
second edition, 1855).
Fig. 12.6
Winkles’s Architectural and Picturesque
Illustrations of the Cathedral Churches of
England and Wales (London: David Bogue,
New edition, 1851), vol. 1, embossed binding.
Fig. 12.7
Benjamin Winkles after drawing by Hablot
Browne, Salisbury Cathedral, North Side.
Engraving, in Winkles’s Architectural and
Picturesque Illustrations of the Cathedral
Churches of England and Wales (London: David
Bogue, New Edition, 1851), vol. 1, facing
p. 6.
Fig. 12.8
Inlaid pavement, Basilica of San Miniato al
Monte, Florence.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Fig. 12.9
W. Harry Rogers after design by John Ruskin,
front cover of embossed cloth binding for The
Seven Lamps of Architecture (London: Smith,
Elder, and Co., 1849).
Fig. 12.10
Possibly by W. Harry Rogers after design by
John Ruskin, front cover of embossed cloth
binding for The Stones of Venice 3 (London:
Smith, Elder, and Co., 1853).
Fig. 12.11
North porch of the Church of Santa Maria
dei Carmini, Venice, with ‘Byzantine’ circular
sculpture (as illustrated in The Stones of Venice
2, Plate XI, figure 5, facing 10.166).
Photo: Stephen Bann.
Fig. 12.12
Henry Twining, On the Philosophy of Painting:
A Theoretical and Practical Treatise (London:
Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans,
1849), embossed leather binding.
Fig. 12.13
George Barnard, after ‘Effect by H. Twining’.
Lithograph, in Henry Twining, On the
Philosophy of Painting: A Theoretical and
Practical Treatise (London: Longman, Brown,
Green, and Longmans, 1849). Facing p. 252.
Fig. 12.14
Thomas Lupton, mezzotint, with T. Boys,
etching, after drawing by John Ruskin, Types of
Towers. Mezzotint and etching, reproduced in
The Stones of Venice 1 (London: Smith, Elder,
and Co., 1851). Plate VI, facing p. 201.
Fig. 12.15
Thomas Lupton after drawing by John
Ruskin, Capitals: Convex Group. Mezzotint,
reproduced in The Stones of Venice 1 (London:
Smith, Elder, and Co., 1851). Plate XVIII,
facing p. 318.
Fig. 12.16
J. C. Armytage after drawing by John Ruskin,
Wall-Veil Decoration, San Michele, Lucca.
Engraving, reproduced in The Stones of Venice 1
(London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1851). Plate
XXI, facing p. 364.
Fig. 12.17
The Church of San Michele, Lucca, south side
of west front and campanile.
Photo: Stephen Bann.
Fig. 12.18
Thomas Shotter Boys after drawing by John
Ruskin, Decoration by Disks, Palazzo dei
Badoari Partecipazzi. Tinted lithograph,
reproduced in The Stones of Venice 1 (London:
Smith, Elder, and Co., 1851). Plate VIII,
facing p. 235.
Fig. 12.19
Detail of the facade of Palazzo Gritti
Badoer (formerly known as Gritti Badoer
Partecipazio), Campo Bandiera e Moro,
Venice.
Photo: Stephen Bann.
Fig. 12.20
Samuel Reynolds, mezzotint, with T. Boys,
etching, after daguerreotype and drawing by
John Ruskin, The Ducal Palace: 20th capital.
Mezzotint and etching, reproduced in
Examples of the Architecture of Venice (London:
Smith, Elder, and Co. Ltd, 1851). Plate 1. Yale
Center for British Art, New Haven CT.
Fig. 12.21
Detail of figure 12.20.
Fig. 12.22
Thomas Lupton, mezzotint, with T. Boys,
etching, after daguerreotype and drawing
by John Ruskin, St Mark’s Southern Portico.
Mezzotint and etching, reproduced in
Examples of the Architecture of Venice (London:
George Allen, 1887 reprint of 1851 edition).
Plate 6. Birmingham Museums.
Photo: Birmingham Museums Trust.
Fig. 12.23
Thomas Shotter Boys after drawing by John
Ruskin, Byzantine Ruins in the Rio di Ca’
Foscari. Tinted lithograph, reproduced in
Examples of the Architecture of Venice (London:
George Allen, 1887 reprint of 1851 edition).
Plate 9. Birmingham Museums.
Photo: Birmingham Museums Trust.
Fig. 12.24
R. P. Cuff after drawing by John Ruskin, The
Ducal Palace: Components of the Southern
Balcony. Engraving, reproduced in Examples
of the Architecture of Venice (London: George
Allen, 1887 reprint of 1851 edition). Plate 5,
figure 3. Birmingham Museums.
Photo: Birmingham Museums Trust.
Fig. 12.25
G. Rosenthal after drawing by John Ruskin,
Cornice Mouldings from Tomb in Church of SS
Giovanni e Paolo. Lithograph, reproduced in
Examples of the Architecture of Venice (London:
George Allen, 1887 reprint of 1851 edition).
Plate 4. Birmingham Museums.
Photo: Birmingham Museums Trust.
Fig. 12.26
G. Rosenthal after drawing by John Ruskin,
Door Heads: In Ramo dirimpetto Mocenigo.
Tinted lithograph, reproduced in Examples
of the Architecture of Venice (London: George
Allen, 1887 reprint of 1851 edition). Plate 12.
Birmingham Museums.
Photo: Birmingham Museums Trust.
Fig. 12.27
Detail of figure 12.26.
Fig. 12.28
J. C. Armytage after two daguerreotypes,
Windows of the Fifth Order. Engraving,
reproduced in The Stones of Venice 2 (London:
Smith, Elder, and Co., 1853). Plate XVIII,
facing p. 266.
Fig. 12.29
Thomas Lupton after drawing by John Ruskin,
Noble and Ignoble Grotesque. Mezzotint,
reproduced in The Stones of Venice 3 [1853]
(London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1867). Plate
III, facing p. 125.
Fig. 12.30
J. C. Armytage after drawing by John Ruskin,
Archivolt in the Duomo of Murano. Engraving
‘In Colors by W. Dickes & Co. Licencees’,
reproduced in The Stones of Venice 2 (London:
Smith, Elder, and Co., 1853). Plate V, facing
p. 45.
Fig. 12.31
Detail of Apse of Basilica of SS Maria e
Donato, Murano.
Photo: Stephen Bann.
Fig. 12.32
J. C. Armytage after drawing by John Ruskin,
Leafage of the Vine Angle. Engraving, The Stones
of Venice 2 (London: Smith, Elder, and Co.,
1853). Plate XIX, facing p. 308.
Fig. 12.33
J. C. Armytage, after drawing by John Ruskin,
Mosaics of Olive-tree and Flowers. Engraving,
printed in blue, reproduced in The Stones of
Venice 3 [1853] (London: Smith, Elder, and
Co., 1867). Plate IV, facing p. 179.
Chapter 13
Fig. 13.1
Jorge Otero-Pailos, The Ethics of Dust: Doge’s
Palace, Venice (2009). Latex, dust, and
pollution, 12 × 7 m. As exhibited in the
Corderie of the 53rd Venice Art Biennale,
transferred from the Ducal Palace. Collection
of Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary
Foundation T-BA21.
Photo: © Jorge Otero-Pailos 2009. All rights
reserved.
Fig. 13.2
Jorge Otero-Pailos, The Ethics of Dust: Doge’s
Palace, Venice (2009). Latex, dust and,
pollution, 12 × 7 m. As exhibited in the
Corderie of the 53rd Venice Art Biennale,
transferred from the Doge’s Palace. Collection
of Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary
Foundation T-BA21.
Photo: © Jorge Otero-Pailos 2009. All rights
reserved.
Chapter 14
Fig. 14.1
R. P. Cuff after John Ruskin, Part of the
Cathedral of St Lô, Normandy. Engraving,
reproduced in The Seven Lamps of Architecture
(1849). Library Edition, Plate Two, facing
8.81.
Fig. 14.2
G. Allen after John Ruskin, ‘Blossoming—and
Stricken in Days’: Common Health or Ling. Steel
engraving, reproduced on the frontispiece to
Proserpina (1875–86). Library Edition, Plate
Nine, facing 25.189.
Fig. 14.3
Witherford Watson Mann Architects, Astley
Castle (2013). Nuneaton.
Photo: © Philip Vile. Courtesy of Witherford
Watson Mann Architects.
Fig. 14.4
Dow Jones Architects, The Garden Museum
(2017). London.
Photo: Ryan Roark.
Fig. 14.5
Haworth Tompkins, Dovecote Studio (2010).
Suffolk.
Photo: © Philip Vile. Courtesy of Haworth
Tompkins.
Fig. 14.6
Amateur Architecture Studio, Ningbo
Museum (2008). Ningbo.
Photo: syrnx / Shutterstock.com.
Fig. 14.7
Kengo Kuma and Associates, China Academy
of Arts’ Folk Art Museum, exterior view
(2015). Hangzhou.
Photo: © Eiichi Kano. Courtesy of Kengo
Kuma and Associates.
Fig. 14.8
Kengo Kuma and Associates, China Academy
of Arts’ Folk Art Museum, interior view
(2015). Hangzhou.
Photo: © Eiichi Kano. Courtesy of Kengo
Kuma and Associates.
Fig. 14.9
Assemble Studio, Goldsmiths Centre for
Contemporary Art (2019). London.
Photo: © Assemble. All rights reserved.
136
137
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
fass/ruskin/eSoV/.
Ruskin, 11.22–3 (The Stones of Venice 3, 1853). On
Ruskin and brickwork, see also Stephen Kite, ‘The Bricks
of Venice: material and craft in John Ruskin’s political
economy’, in Juliet Odgers, Mhairi McVicar, and
Stephen Kite (eds.), Economy and Architecture (Abingdon:
Routledge, 2015).
Ruskin, 11.27.
Ruskin, 24.163 (Guide to the Principle Pictures in The
Academy of Fine Arts at Venice, 1877).
Ruskin, 24.163.
Manfred Schuller, ‘Le facciate dei palazzo medioevali
di Venezia. Ricerche su singoli esempi architettonici’,
in Francesco Valcanover and Wolfgang Wolters (eds.),
L’Architettura Gotica Veneziana (Venice: Instituto Veneto di
Scienze, Letteri ed Arti, 2000), p. 338.
Jacob Burckhardt, The Architecture of the Italian
Renaissance [1867], (trans.) James Palmes, (ed.) Peter
Murray (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 46;
Ruskin, 9.323 (The Stones of Venice 1, 1851); See also Paul
Hills, Venetian Colour: Marble, Mosaic, Painting and Glass
1250–1550 (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1999), p. 12.
Ruskin, 11.23 (The Stones of Venice 3, 1853).
Ruskin, 11.28.
Hills, Venetian Colour, pp. 66–7.
Ruskin, 10.264 (The Stones of Venice 2, 1853).
Ruskin, 8.108 (The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 1849).
Ruskin, 8.109.
Nikolaus Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art [1956]
(Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1964),
p. 105.
Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art, p. 107.
Morris, News from Nowhere, pp. 189–90.
William Morris, ‘Gothic Architecture’, in May Morris, The
Art of William Morris: Morris as a Writer [1936], vol. 1 of
May Morris, William Morris, Artist, Writer, Socialist, two
volumes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012),
p. 275.
William Morris, ‘Address on the collection of paintings
of the English Pre-Raphaelite school in the City of
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery on Friday,
October 24, 1891’, in Morris, The Art of William Morris,
pp. 302–3.
Percy Lubbock, Shades of Eton [1929] (London: Jonathan
Cape, 1932), pp. 93–4. See also May Morris, The Art of
William Morris, pp. 38–9.
Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design: from William
Morris to Walter Gropius [1936] (London: Pelican Books,
1960), pp. 58–9; see for example, Peter Davey, Arts and
Crafts Architecture (London: Phaidon, 1995), pp. 39–40.
See also Nicholas Cooper, ‘Red House: Some Architectural
Histories’, Architectural History 49 (2006): pp. 207–21.
J. W. Mackail, The Life of William Morris [1899], two
volumes (London: Longmans, Green, 1901), vol. 1,
p. 142.
See Rob Aben and Sakia de Wit, The Enclosed Garden:
History and Development of the Hortus Conclusus and
its Reintroduction into the Present-day Urban Landscape
(Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2001), pp. 37–40.
Aben and de Wit, The Enclosed Garden, p. 247; see also
Tessa Wild, William Morris and the Palace of Art (London:
Philip Wilson, 2018), p. 201.
British Library, Harley MS 4425; acquired by the nation
in 1753 under the Act of Parliament that established the
British Museum, and one of the foundation collections
of the British Library. See also Fiona MacCarthy, The
Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian
Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 2012), p. 151.
Morris, ‘The Man Born to Be King: The Medieval Tale for
March’, in The Earthly Paradise (Boston: Roberts Brothers,
1868), vol. 1, lines 1660–88, 1890–3.
William Morris, ‘Making the Best of It’ (a paper read
before the Trades’ Guild of Learning and the Birmingham
Society of Artists, 1879), in William Morris, Hopes and
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
84.
85.
Fears for Art: Five lectures delivered in Birmingham, London,
and Nottingham, 1878–1881 (London: Ellis and White,
1882), p. 128.
Peter Blundell-Jones, ‘Red House’, Architects’ Journal 183:3
(15 January 1986): p. 47.
See for example, Ray Watkinson, Morris as Designer
(London: Studio Vista, 1967), p. 42.
Ruskin, 9.284–5 (The Stones of Venice 1, 1851), Ruskin’s
emphasis.
Ruskin, 9.285. See also Michaela Braesel, ‘The Influence
of Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts on the PreRaphaelites and the Early Poetry of William Morris’,
Journal of William Morris Studies 15:4 (2004): p. 41.
Aben and de Wit, Enclosed Garden, p. 44.
See related manuscript analysis diagram in Aben and de
Wit, Enclosed Garden, p. 43.
Alina Payne, Ornament to Object: Genealogies of
Architectural Modernism (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2012), p. 89.
Ruskin, 12.83 (Lectures on Architecture and Painting,
1854), Ruskin’s emphasis.
Payne, Ornament to Object, p. 90.
Linda Parry (ed.), William Morris, exhibition catalogue,
Victoria and Albert Museum (London: Philip Wilson,
V&A Publishing, 1996), p. 172.
Braesel, ‘Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts’, p. 41.
Hermann Muthesius, The English House, three volumes
[Das Englische Haus, 1904–5)], (trans.) Janet Seligman and
Stewart Spencer, (ed.) Dennis Sharp (London: Frances
Lincoln, 2007), vol. 3, p. 89.
See Wild, Morris and his Palace of Art, pp. 119–25.
Mackail, Life of William Morris, vol. 1, pp. 372–3.
Linda Parry, William Morris Textiles (London: V&A
Publishing, 2013), p. 185; and Imogen Hart, ‘An
“Enchanted” Interior: William Morris at Kelmscott
House’, in Jason Edwards and Imogen Hart (eds.),
Rethinking the Interior, c.1867–1896: Aestheticism and Arts
and Crafts (Farnham,: Ashgate, 2010).
See Caroline Arscott, William Morris and Edward
Burne-Jones: Interlacings (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2008), pp. 88–9.
Wild, Morris and his Palace of Art, pp. 119–28.
See Charlotte Gere, Artistic Circles: Design and Decoration
in the Aesthetic Movement (London: V&A Publishing,
2010), pp. 161–2.
Georgina Burne-Jones, quoted in Wild, Morris and his
Palace of Art, p. 205.
William Morris, ‘The Lesser Arts of Life’ [1878], in
William Morris, Architecture, Industry and Wealth
(London: Longmans, Green, 1902), p. 68.
See Wild, Morris and his Palace of Art, p. 145.
Watkinson, Morris as Designer, p. 52.
Joanna Banham, ‘The English Response: Mechanization
and Design Reform’, in Lesley Hoskins (ed.), The Papered
Wall: The History, Patterns and Techniques of Wallpaper
(London: Thames and Hudson, 2005), pp. 138–9, see for
example fig. 186, ‘Floral pattern by William Woollams &
Co., block-printed in colours, 1849’.
Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life for our Time
(London: Faber and Faber, 1995), p. 107, my emphasis.
Quoted in Hart, ‘An “Enchanted” Interior’, p. 79.
Quoted in Gere, Artistic Circles, p. 165.
Lewis F. Day, ‘A Kensington Interior’, The Art Journal
(May 1893): p. 141.
Day, ‘Kensington Interior’, p. 141.
Gleeson White, ‘An Epoch Making House’, The Studio 14
(1898): p. 111.
Henry James, quoted in Caroline Dakers, The Holland
Park Circle: Artists and Victorian Society (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 238.
The Osteological
Line
KELLY FREEMAN
6
138
Kelly Freeman
The Osteological Line
I start this chapter with John Ruskin’s botanical sketch, Study of a Lettuce Thistle (1854),
a subtle rendering of two spiky thistle leaves with their associated stalks (Fig. 6.1).1 The
ink drawing is likely an observation from living, growing nature, the lack of artistic
finesse and granular detail indicative of rapid study, and the patchy, albeit intense,
washes of bright blue ink suggestive of the outdoors. Sharp, undulating U-shaped lines
fill the bottom of the page, their barbed forms echoing the thistle leaves above. Included
amongst these lines is a scrawl of downward-slanting text in Ruskin’s own hand:
‘Everything depends on this action’. It could be that Ruskin was referring to the action
of drawing and, more especially, to the repetitive, tick-like lineation that he has drawn
to the side of and below the sketch that echo the tick-shaped edges—the spines—on the
prickly leaf. The lines of leaf growth and the characteristic serrated edges of the spines
are the result of an action: Ruskin’s hand in action. In Study of a Lettuce Thistle, the
drawing process is the action, and the repetition of frenetic undulating lines re-enact and
become analogous to its dynamic growth in nature. There is unquestionably also action
involved in the growth and formation of the prickly and painful thistle, its fundamental
nature fully realised in the needle-like edges so necessary in the deterrent of predators,
and which act to secure their prodigious establishment within our landscape. As Ruskin
himself noted over twenty years later in the first volume of Proserpina (first published in
1875) when describing the coarse, hardy structure of certain wild or parasitic plants:
Fig. 6.1
John Ruskin, Study
of a Lettuce Thistle,
Diary (1854). Ink
on paper, 19.7
× 15.5 cm. The
Ruskin—Library,
Museum and
Research Centre,
University of
Lancaster, Bailrigg.
Photo: © The
Ruskin—Library,
Museum and
Research Centre,
University of
Lancaster.
The character of strength which gives prevalence over others to any common
plant, is more or less consistently dependent on woody fibre in the leaves; giving
them strong ribs and great expanding extent; or spinous edges, and wrinkled
or gathered extent … Get clearly into your mind the nature of these two
conditions. When a leaf is to be spread wide, like the Burdock, it is supported
by a framework of extending ribs like a Gothic roof. The supporting function
of these is geometrical; every one is constructed like the girders of a bridge, or
beams of a floor, with all manner of science in the distribution of their substance
in the section, for narrow and deep strength; and the shafts are mostly hollow.
But when the extending space of a leaf is to be enriched with fulness of folds,
and become beautiful in wrinkles, this may be done either by pure undulation
as of a liquid current along the leaf edge, or by sharp ‘drawing’—or ‘gathering’
I believe ladies would call it—and stitching of the edges together … And in
beautiful work of this kind, which we are meant to study, the stays of the leaf—
or stay-bones—are finished off very sharply and exquisitely at the points; and
indeed so much so, that they prick our fingers when we touch them; for they are
not at all meant to be touched, but admired. To be admired,—with qualification,
indeed, always, but with extreme respect for their endurance and orderliness.2
The thistle’s endurance and very survival depends on succeeding in this ‘sharp “drawing”’
action, so too do the lives of the caterpillars, butterflies, bees, and finches that rely on
its sustenance and protection. Everything depends on this action. In Study of a Lettuce
Thistle Ruskin captures the active participation of the thistle within its wider ecology via
the thin, sharp, and decisive outline of its spiny leaves, abstracted again into the single
noble line.
It would be easy to assume that by action Ruskin also meant function, a term
heavily discussed within secular nineteenth-century writings on natural philosophy,
and later in physiology (the science of function in living systems) and which would
bridge Ruskin’s work with contemporary science. However, action has a very particular
meaning separate to function. Functions were mechanical and utilitarian; action implies
139
life and force, growth and time. Action also intimates directionality, a path to be taken.
In his essay ‘Reading Nature: John Ruskin, Environment, and the Ecological Impulse’
(2017), Mark Frost draws attention to how Ruskin perceived the dynamic process of
lineation within a wider ecology of nature’s cycles: of compositions and decompositions.
Quoting from The Elements of Drawing (1857), in which Ruskin stresses the importance
of the ‘leading or governing lines’ that express a vital truth about the growth of the
plant or the ‘leading lines’ that reveal the makeup and erosion of the mountain, Frost
presents Ruskin as a proto-ecological thinker whose principle aim was to articulate the
human experience within, and in relation to, its wider environmental systems.3 The
interconnectedness, interdependence, and temporality of life cycles and systems could
be abstracted and represented through lineation. Just as the tree bows to the will of
the winds or a stream divert its course to circumvent an obstacle, ‘these chief lines are
140
Kelly Freeman
always expressive of the past history and present action of the thing’.4 The shape of the
lettuce thistle is made up of lines of action, and it is these lines that, for Ruskin, must be
extracted from its form for the essence of its nature to be honestly realised and rendered.
Ruskin described a leaf with its veins, spines, and spiral growth patterns as marks of ‘the
forces of growth and expansion’, and these lines of force are then extracted from the leaf
and become represented within ornamental carvings and abstract patterns.5
What is so interesting here is that Ruskin, in his quest to capture organic life,
seized upon the most vital lines in nature—the lifelines as such—which give form and
vigour to things, and which he then abstracted and recorded in his drawings. These lines
singled out the inner parts of the form that indicated directional growth, structure, and
survival, such as the veins and edges of leaves and the curves and spirals of shells. The
lines also delineated the makeup of things, the morphological ‘outline’ of natural entities
or landscapes such as crests of waves and jagged mountainscapes. It was only from these
essential lines that the very essence of nature could be truthfully represented on a page,
carved into stone or hammered into iron. It was from these very lines—traced from an
active organic nature—that Ruskin conceived and developed a wider ecology of lines. By
Ruskin’s own account, it was through actively observing and drawing from nature that
he was able to perceive the lines from which nature was composed. Everything depends on
this action.
I want to explore the ecological line that connects all things together in Ruskin’s
writings on art, architecture, and natural history; the line weaves its way through Modern
Painters (1843–60) and The Stones of Venice (1851–3), and gets caught up and tangled
in the concepts of sympathy, composition, and Gothic. One could easily consider the
Gothic as an ecological concept, a paradigm that emerged in distinction to the other
natural sciences in the mid-nineteenth century.6 Frost points out that ecology ‘valorises
the vital connectedness of heterogeneous phenomena—that which Ruskin perceived
as early as 1843, when he noted that “there is indeed in nature variety in all things”,
and that “the truths of nature are one eternal change—one infinite variety”’.7 From
the bladed wings of the darting swallow to the lateen sailboats of the Mediterranean,
Ruskin draws ecological lines of relation between things: lines that are constant and
infinite, lines that are interrupted and staggered, lines that overlap and unfurl, and lines
that are the reflections, echoes or shadows of other lines that connect across geological
time.8 These essential ecological lines are something that I wish to follow within Ruskin’s
works, paying particular attention to his use of bodily, or more specifically, bony
metaphors that express these lines, such as the spine of the thistle leaf and the ribs of a
Gothic cathedral, and that, in my mind, forge verbal, visual, and material connections to
help articulate other sympathetic lines, and which configure themselves into something
resembling the body’s skeleton: something laminar, organic, purposeful, sensate, and
whole.
Tracing relations: the aspen
So, let us begin at the end, with Ruskin’s autobiographical work Praeterita (1885–9). In
the second volume of Praeterita (1886–7), Ruskin recalled a moment in 1842 when, as a
young man, he was travelling in Switzerland. Whilst journeying through Fontainebleau
he stopped to draw an aspen tree. The encounter is described in a manner akin to
conversion parable, marking the exact moment when Ruskin’s perception of the world
around him was fundamentally transformed:
Languidly, but not idly, I began to draw; and as I drew, the languor passed away:
The Osteological Line
the beautiful lines insisted on being traced,—without weariness. More and more
beautiful they became, as each rose out of the rest, and took its place in the air.
With wonder increasing every instant, I saw that they ‘composed’ themselves, by
finer laws than any known of men. At last the tree was there, and everything that
I had thought before about trees, nowhere.9
Ruskin traced the lines of growth, and these lines informed the eventual shape of the
tree. This passage provides many clues concerning Ruskin’s vision of the natural world,
not just how he perceived its wondrous beauty but also its unfathomable depths,
reaching far beyond laws of men, inferring that nature is a composition with intelligently
composed rhythms and harmonies. He held fast to the belief that connections with the
divine were made possible through natural forms. In Ruskin’s own account, drawing
provided a means of seeing the ‘composition’ of nature.
In the last volume of Modern Painters (1860), Ruskin drew attention to his
chapter ‘The Law of Help’ as the ‘last and the most important part of our subject’, that
subject being art and its relation to ‘God and man’.10 One could conceive of ‘The Law of
Help’ as his treatise on relation: the relations between ‘material or formal invention’—
the technical composition, the arrangement of lines, forms, colours—as well as the
relations between ‘expressional or spiritual invention’. Expressional or spiritual invention
is harder to define, but Ruskin identified it as the ‘delight’ felt from art, where the viewer
‘rejoices’ in the arrangement, composition and the sense of completion and wholeness.
This sense of joyful wholeness takes into account the making ‘process’ that lurks behind
every composition, arrangement, and assemblage in art. It is not an additive as such,
it cannot be conjured into the art, but it is understood by Ruskin as the complicated
relation between a medium and craftsman, and an energy born from its creator.11 As
Ruskin said, ‘to create anything in reality is to put life into it. A poet [maker], or creator,
is therefore a person who puts things together, not as a watchmaker steel, or a shoemaker
leather, but who puts life into them’.12 In this way pictures are still and not still, and the
material, composition, lines, colours, forms, sense of completion, and ‘process’ lend a
vital yet inexplicable animation to the artwork.
As well as art and architecture, Ruskin’s theory of composition was also
applicable to nature itself, as perceived by Ruskin on his way to Fontainebleau when he
drew the aspen tree. In his own words, ‘[e]very great work stands alone. Yet there are
certain elementary laws of arrangement’.13 Ruskin defined composition himself as the
‘help of everything … by everything else’ in order to approach ‘completeness’. It includes
the action of putting things together—the process—through formation or construction.
The notion of ‘help’ means to assist, to make easier, or to be of use, and is applied not
just to the assemblage as a whole, but to the parts and their relations or sympathies with
each other. For Ruskin, inanimate homogeneous substances making up rocks or clouds,
for example, do not ‘help’ each other, that is to say in such undifferentiated matter the
removal of one part will not injure the whole. They are helpless or ‘lifeless’, and from
this perspective they stand alone in and of themselves. However, ‘hurt or remove any
portion of the sap, bark, or pith, the rest is injured’. The plant is animate and ‘helpful’,
and ‘the power which causes several portions of the plant to help each other, we call
life’.14 The intensity of that life is directly proportional to the intensity of helpfulness,
and the dependence of each part on the rest, so that ‘we may take away the branch of
a tree without much harm to it; but not the animal’s limb’.15 Does the greater intensity
of life that Ruskin perceives in the animal relate to its dynamism, energy, and life force?
Or does ‘intensity’ relate to its precarious nature as it battles for survival? In a potential
response to Darwinian pessimism, Ruskin considered help as part of the divine nature
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Kelly Freeman
The Osteological Line
Fig. 6.2
John Ruskin, Tree
Studies (c.1845–
55). Pencil, black
ink, ink wash, and
bodycolour on blue
paper, 55.2 × 38
cm. The Ruskin—
Library, Museum
and Research
Centre, University
of Lancaster,
Bailrigg.
Photo: © The
Ruskin—Library,
Museum and
Research Centre,
University of
Lancaster.
in all things, and that life is in action, in a process of ‘helpful’ becomings. He rejected
the idea of nature as a battleground. Instead, nature was composed by the ‘Helpful one’
or ‘the Holy one’, meaning God and life giver, and is therefore governed by ‘The Law of
Help’, the law of life. For Ruskin, the ‘anarchy and competition’ of Darwinian natural
selection followed ‘the laws of death’.16
Tracing relations: articulation
In defining help as ‘life’, Ruskin defines death as helplessness and ‘separation’.17 These
processes, sensations and feelings that Ruskin describes in ‘The Law of Help’ could
then be understood as articulations between parts or members, bringing things together
and allowing them to achieve their potential by uniting and animating them.18 These
articulations are certainly animal rather than vegetal, and by that I mean that the
joints in an animal occur at points where the structure is thinnest, where breaks in
homogenous ossified tissue occur to allow for multidirectional movement; where
parts come together to create a greater whole; where relation becomes unification; but
also where elements are easiest to break apart. Ruskin described the vital importance
of articular claws and leg joints in the exoskeletons of crustaceans, enabling their
unique defensive action and mobility. In a plant, articulation occurs at the stiffest part,
densely woven, thickened and strengthened, creating a stable hard knot. A plant does
not dislocate at its joints; it persists because of its joints.19 The articulations made by
Ruskin in ‘The Law of Help’ are not petrified. They are capable of reconfiguration, of
dislocating and, in turn, forming new articulations, and this potential for breaking
apart and reassembly gives generative dynamism and diversity of sensation to the object
of our attention. In terms of art, one of the ways this reconfiguration is effected is by
the viewer, who superimposes their own subjectivity, their own network of feelings
and articulations, upon the network of articulations in the picture, sculpture, or
building. The articular gaps in one configure the articulations in the other, forming
countless pathways for sensation and energy to flow in a process of configuration
and reconfiguration, of recomposition and decomposition, of reorder and collapse,
and regeneration. I want to pick out one particular statement made by Frost on vital
beauty and fold it into my definition of articulation: Frost remarks that Ruskin asked
his readers to observe the ‘vital beauty’ and ‘leading lines’ of nature, vital beauty being
the moment of realisation ‘when we recognise effort and energy as something familiar’,
when ‘[s]ubject and object draw closer in a moment of recognition of one another’s
common experience of pleasure and energy’.20 This is truest for Ruskin in relation to
art. The vital beauty and the leading lines of nature are, of course, modes of relation for
Ruskin, and the openness of relation to reconfiguration is an invitation to the viewer
to communicate: to commune. This communication is, however, never complete,
the communion never whole. The network of articulations in the object and that in
the viewer imperfectly align. In this registry of misalignment is humanity, our own
imperfect natures. If we return to Ruskin’s aspen tree, he traces the line, bends to its
will and is enlivened by the process: ‘without weariness’; ‘[a]t last the tree was there, and
everything that I had thought before about trees, nowhere’. This is a once-in-a-lifetime
encounter where the object being perceived consumes the will of the viewer, irrevocably
transforming the subject, breaking them away from their tethered self. Most of Ruskin’s
encounters with nature, art, and architecture are not quite so epiphanic. In most cases
in life, neither subject nor object bends entirely to the will of the other. They survive
the encounter, they are not brittle (unless we are near, in Ruskin’s terms, helplessness
and death) but there is a limit to their flexibility and openness to reconfiguration, an
143
integrity they must maintain. The abutting of two forces—two wills—generates a kind
of frictive energy, which will enliven or sustain us, just as Ruskin’s aspen tree chased away
his weariness. Imperfect human composition enables reconfiguration and in this sense
the artwork or artefact is available to the future, to countless future encounters. In so
far as the epitome of articulation is the human figure, this is how we might understand
Ruskin’s description of J. M. W. Turner, in a letter to Charles Eliot Norton (1867), as
making ‘glorious human flesh’ of the world.21
Although the original drawing to which the description in Praeterita pertains
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Kelly Freeman
has not yet been identified, and likely never will, we can attempt to understand Ruskin’s
thought processes by applying the aforementioned passage by Ruskin to his 1845
drawing entitled Tree Studies (Fig. 6.2). Depicting a woodland coppice, the drawing’s
centre possesses the darkest swathes of colour and the more concentrated lines depicting
gnarled and twisted roots and branches. The darkness is almost menacing, nightmarish;
a strange beast could be emerging from the centre rather than harmless branches. The
lines make up the various tree forms, yet it is the shading with dark ink that solidifies
and situates the lines in space. It appears that Ruskin began the drawing in the centre of
the sheet of paper, in the place where the tree grows from the rock. Working upwards,
following the curved, ‘composed’ lines of tree growth, the rock seems to anchor and
shape the thicket’s life.
In his analysis of Ruskin’s drawings of natural phenomena, Paul Walton
interprets Ruskin’s conception of nature as the
visible signs of an impulse that moves everywhere, in accordance with the
divine law … Ruskin now saw this vital current widespread, so that to his eyes,
nature was no longer a more or less haphazard collection of forms, waiting to be
transformed by the artist into images of ideal harmony, but a living organism
shaped from within by forces that imposed a common harmonious visual
rhythm on rock, and cloud, and wave.22
Rhythms and forces; impulses and movements; Ruskin’s vision or ‘truth’ to nature was
nature in motion, never suspended, sometimes imperceptibly slow, sometimes fleetingly
fast but always in rhythmic motion. It was these rhythms that produced the lines and
patterns in nature that Ruskin searched for. He candidly acknowledged that his drawings
would never be the picturesque compositions of other artists, such as those made by his
travelling companion during his 1845 European tour, James Duffield Harding, but his
drawings could become far more valuable. In a letter to his father, Ruskin referred to the
sketches he had made in his notebook: ‘[M]ine are always ugly, for I consider my sketch
only as a written note of certain facts, and those I put down in the rudest and clearest
way as many as possible. Harding’s all for impression—mine all for information’.23
Ruskin dwelt upon the idea of the line capturing the essential form of the object/
subject throughout his life. He seized upon these leading lines, naming them the ‘aweful
lines’ (‘aweful’ meaning ‘full of awe’) which are to be extracted from whatever form is
being contemplated. These are the lines that show the history of a thing, as well as its
present course and its futurity. They are lines of action on which everything depends:
Try always, whenever you look at a form, to see the lines in it which have had
power over its past fate and will have power over its futurity. Those are its aweful
lines; see that you seize on those, whatever else you miss.24
Articulating lines in architecture
The drawing of Tree Studies could be interpreted as a metaphor for how the first Gothic
architecture was built, from nature twisting around stone, in keeping with ‘The Nature
of Gothic’ in the second volume of The Stones of Venice (1853). Although the drawing
is arguably unfinished, I would not suppose it to be rough or unstructured. I perceive a
delicacy in the application of ink, and intentionality to the lineation and composition.
I perceive in the drawing the process of organic growth, like a seed that has begun
The Osteological Line
to germinate, latent but with the potential for life. Generative energy seems to be
drawn from the attentiveness of the drawing process itself, until we are presented with
something that has composed itself into the living network of a tree. In the first volume
of Stones (1851) when addressing archivolts, in terms of the lintel which he used to
define classical Greek architecture, Ruskin contends that there ‘is no organism to direct
its ornament’, whereas in Gothic architecture ‘the arch head has a natural organism’.25
The term ‘organism’ seems to refer to an energy that Ruskin perceives within the
structural elements of the Gothic architecture. He infers that this energy is required for
ornament, and that the straight-lined lintel is somehow deficient. Yet the Gothic arch—
two serpentine lines that converge to a point—possesses a natural energy. One could
imagine this line of tension in the arch of a bridge. The stones of the arch are locked
into place by the keystone at its apex, which holds all the stones in place. Without the
keystone, the other stones in the arch will fall. It is the forces within the stone, and the
forces that the stone is capable of withstanding, that drives the form of the structure,
which is why the Gothic arch is so often compared to the shape of a growing leaf whose
morphology is determined by internal and external forces.26
In the first volume of Stones, Ruskin looked back to the ruins of Venice in an
attempt to save the Gothic legacy for England. He described Venice along the grand
tradition of metaphorical rhetoric. It has towers that rise ‘as a branchless forest’.27 Ruskin
was swift to reassure the reader that his evaluation of Venetian architecture was not
necessarily the definitive answer to the questions of what components constitute good
or bad architecture. There were bound to be alternative perspectives and interpretations,
just as he said: ‘Zoologists often disagree in their descriptions of a curve of a shell or the
plumage of a bird’.28 As Ruskin wrote, ‘pointed arches do not constitute Gothic, nor
vaulted roofs, nor flying buttresses, nor grotesque sculptures; but all or some of these
things, and many other things with them, when they come together so as to have life’.29
Ruskin discussed buildings like they were living organisms, yet his conception of
the Gothic included the idea of ‘madeness’, as the craftsmen were also to be considered
as part of the Gothic architecture, their spirits fusing with Gothic matter, ‘Mental
Expression’ with ‘Material Form’.30 This generates another dimension to the life of the
structure, increases the tensions between life and death, of creation and destruction,
and casts an invisible line through time that connects the present to the past. Yet this
idea, of bringing life to an immobile structure, comes to an unavoidable impasse when
confronted with biological definitions that make movement a condition of life.31
This poses a particular problem since Ruskin made ‘rigidity’ a key element of the
Gothic style. However, he was aware of this metaphysical conundrum and opened the
possibility of an animation of the rigidity of Gothic architecture, using the oxymoron
‘active rigidity’ to address ‘the peculiar energy which gives tension to movement’.32
Ruskin continued by stating that this rigidity was ‘a stiffness analogous to that of the
bones of a limb, or fibres of a tree; and elastic tension and communication of force
from part to part, and also a studious expression of this throughout every visible line
of the building’.33 The concept is remarkably Albertian, particularly in the way it was
founded upon a notion of communication between parts. Like Leon Battista Alberti,
Ruskin analogised architecture with trees, fibres, limbs, and bone.34 He also considered
architecture as an ‘organism’ of energy. By aligning pith and bone with force and
stiffness, Ruskin reaffirmed organic structures as agents of ‘active rigidity’. Bones may be
stiff, but when part of a living organism they allow for its movements. The energy that
Ruskin perceived in architecture is something that I would describe as a potential for
movement, which builds up in the points of structural articulation. Ruskin saw bone as
part of an active animated system that supports and energises the architectural organism:
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146
Kelly Freeman
Fig. 6.3
Frontispiece to
A Compendium
of Osteology
(1833). Printed
in George Witt,
A Compendium of
Osteology: Being a
Systematic Treatise
of the Bones of
the Human Body
(London: Longman
& Co., 1833).
Photo: National
Collections Centre,
Science Museum
Group.
The Osteological Line
147
that which admits, regulates, or restrains the visible motions of the leaf; while
the system of circulation can only be studied through the microscope. But the
ribbed leaf bears itself to the wind, as the webbed foot of a bird does to the
water, and needs the same kind, though not the same strength, of support; and
its ribs always are partly therefore constituted of strong woody substance, which
is knit out of the tissue; and you can extricate this skeleton framework, and keep
it, after the leaf-tissue is dissolved. So I shall henceforward speak simply of the
leaf and its ribs,—only specifying the additional veined structure on necessary
occasions.37
Skeletal metaphors are ideal terms then for Ruskin; they communicate the active
mechanical framework of the leaf, which circulates vital nutrients and provides a
scaffolding for the ‘leaf-tissue’ to attach. The skeleton is also the part of the leaf that
persists after the softer fleshy tissue has decomposed. The nineteenth-century
understanding of the skeleton as the body’s framework, a framework that remained even
after death, still capable of expressing a former living being’s essential form was crucial
for its potential to become a metaphor for the architectural framework. The skeleton
evoked a kind of rational simplicity and purity to a building’s design, structure, form,
and function—the bare bones, so to speak. An illustrative example of the skeleton being
expressed in architecture can be found in Alfred Bartholomew’s Specifications for Practical
Architecture (1840), although the skeleton metaphor was not mentioned within
a living skeleton of stone.35
The long-established trope of the architecture-body metaphor can be found, to
some degree, in every nineteenth-century anatomical treatise that discusses bones and
the skeleton. For example, the frontispiece for George Witt’s Compendium on Osteology
from 1833 presents a kind of Promethean mason, chiselling away at a rock to reveal the
skeleton, and invoking ideas of craftsmanship, architecture, and sculpture, as well as
the material associations of bone with stone (Fig. 6.3).36 This image can be interpreted
as the craftsman ‘creating’ from stone in the Ruskinian sense, but at the same time the
stone is determining the structure being revealed—a will to form, so to speak. The tools
in the hands of the craftsman-turned-anatomist are positioned at the metaphorical
surface between mind and matter, as mental form is impressed on material substrate.
The skeleton is presented upright, fully articulated, and whole. The association with
Promethean creation is overt, the creator giving ‘life’ and vitality to its creation just as
Ruskin discussed in ‘The Law of Help’. There is also a connection to the materiality of
rock, which may hide secret vital forces within its mundane exterior. Added to which
is the knowledge that fossil hunting was a much-enjoyed Victorian pastime and major
paleontological discoveries were commonplace in the nineteenth century. Ruskin was
conscious of his use of bodily metaphors. In Proserpina, he directs the reader’s attention
to the ‘confused use’ of anatomical terms when applied to the subject of botany:
Looking at the back of your laurel-leaves, you see how the central rib or spine of
each, and the lateral branchings, strengthen and carry it. I find much confused
use, in botanical works, of the words Vein and Rib. For, indeed, there are veins
in the ribs of leaves, as marrow in bones; and the projecting bars often gradually
depress themselves into a transparent net of rivers. But the mechanical force
of the framework in carrying the leaf-tissue is the point first to be noticed; it is
Fig. 6.4
R. Hart, Diagram
of Gothic Buttressing
(1840). Reproduced
in Alfred
Bartholomew,
‘Of Abutments’
in Specifications
for Practical
Architecture
(London: J.
Williams & Co.,
1840), part one,
chapter 52, section
463, unpaginated.
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Kelly Freeman
Bartholomew’s architectural treatise (Fig. 6.4).38 The ‘living’ skeleton is figured as a
buttress supporting the Gothic edifice with its ‘arms’, the weight and angle of its ‘body’
situated in such a way as to transfer forces from the building proper to the ground. The
skeleton’s upright form and ‘bracing’ stance fit neatly into the architectural members of a
flying buttress, which is composed of an architectural arch and pier, and is designed to
transmit lateral forces between the wall and the pier. This illustration brings attention to
the internal and external forces acting upon architecture, and how the thin bony arms of
the buttress are all that are required to achieve architectural equilibrium. There is a
remarkable lightness to human bone that belies its robustness. The analogy I have been
describing is fundamentally an analogy between Gothic and the skeleton’s delicate
strength. Although this image does not quite visualise the ‘active rigidity’ that Ruskin
perceived in the Gothic, it does equate the natural-built world to the human-built world
in an intriguing, almost embodied way. The afterlife of bone extends into the stone’s
materiality, being often composed of the bones and shells of marine organisms.
Furthermore, in the body, structure is provided by the scaffold of the skeleton, bones
held together by ligaments and tendons which hold bone to bone and bone to muscle,
enabling action and movement. What is absent from this illustration are the sinews that
hold the whole together. They are, however, implicit as the skeleton is standing and
active. The skeleton not only supports the building but has become a necessary part of
the architecture, literally holding up the wall of the cathedral, crowned with a turret,
which makes a rather characterful and comical tableau. The skeleton is thus presented as
an ideal form to fulfil that particular function. Furthermore, the apparent lifelessness of
the body devoid of flesh does not always mean death. This is neither a carcass nor a
resurrected skeletal body; the illustration depicts the imaginative abstraction of the
essence of the living human body in support of a cathedral wall.
The skeleton is not confined to the outside of the building, to holding up the
wall. Let us imagine ourselves standing inside the Gothic cathedral. Looking upwards
the stone ribs of the vault spanning the ceiling of the Gothic church are intended to
evoke a cavity, ideas of interiority and the invisible transfer of weights and loads. They
interlace and interweave across the vaults above and through the columns and articulate
the windows and doorways. The skeleton becomes a visual metaphor for envisaging an
ideal system of structural support that facilitates the dispersal of multidirectional internal
and external forces, such as compression, thrust and shear, which are balanced in a state
of static equilibrium.39 No one element can subsume another, they must all relate equally
and as a composed assemblage. This is how Ruskin conceived the Gothic skeleton, not as
a lifeless humanoid ruin, rigid, hard, and calcified, but as an abstract linear figuration, an
articulation of lines that support—help—and give life to the structure. As with Study of
a Lettuce Thistle, the lines are active, a distillation of the cathedral’s essence, and
everything depends on them.
Lars Spuybroek identified the architectural rib as the active agent in Gothic
structure.40 Taking up the idea of the ‘abstract line’ developed by Wilhelm Worringer in
his Abstraction and Empathy (1908), Spuybroek observed that ‘the behaviour of the line
however small and thin they are, displays a structural and connective logic’, further
describing the Gothic line as a ‘living’ line that produces structures.41 For Spuybroek, the
curving ribs multiply: they grow, intersect, bifurcate, articulate, transform, and flow
throughout Gothic architecture. The line’s modulation has neither beginning nor end.
The line flows, existing in a kind of in-between, too thin to carry weight and too thick to
be delicate ornament. It is a rib of ‘active rigidity’, as defined by Ruskin in ‘The Nature
of Gothic’, in which, as Spuybroek remarks, ‘[e]very rib is formed by linear figures in
which every point on the line is active’.42 The line is initially perceived by the craftsmen,
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149
Fig. 6.5
R. P. Cuff after
John Ruskin,
Ornaments from
Rouen, St Lô, and
Venice. Engraving,
reproduced in The
Seven Lamps of
Architecture (1849).
Library Edition,
Plate One, facing
8.52.
as they ardently, joyfully, and wilfully carve figures into the stone. The Gothic craftsman
is receptive to the will of the line, which draws itself ‘in relation to other lines … Here
the lines rule over one another’. These lines are active, not in themselves ‘but because
they want to find each other’.43 The lines are further activated by the beholder of such
architectures via foliated organic branching and converging, such as described by
Worringer’s vitalised Gothic line in which abstraction and empathy merge.44 The line
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Kelly Freeman
Fig. 6.6
R. P. Cuff after John
Ruskin, Window
from the Ca’ Foscari,
Venice. Engraving,
reproduced in The
Seven Lamps of
Architecture (1849).
Library Edition,
Plate Eight, facing
8.132.
The Osteological Line
later by Spuybroek, could be aptly applied to the skeleton as an entity, itself possessing
properties of structural stability whilst retaining flexibility and a potential for animation
and growth.
The lines of growth and action, so conspicuously abstracted for our attention in
Study of a Lettuce Thistle, are active within the Gothic, in foliated figuration. In Plate
One of The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), Ruskin has depicted multiple
architectural forms from Rouen, Saint-Lô, and Venice, made up in their entirety of
ornamental carving (Fig. 6.5). The prickly thistle (bottom left) is transplanted, petrified
in some instances, into the very fabric of the structural element. The thistle leaves look
so very lifelike that one could reach out and imagine touching a painful barb. In the
lower left of the plate, several stems are bundled into a kind of prickly bouquet. It is
difficult to tell if the bouquet is of organic tissue or stone, so close is its association with
the ornamental web covering the adjacent capital. The somewhat unruly lines of the
spinous stems in the lower left are stylised on the column, but in such a way as to remain
lifelike. The monochromatic plate emphasises for us the shadows which throw into relief
the lightness of the leaves. Their form is created by these shadows, thrown forward to sit
upon the architectural element, certainly a part of the structure but also separate in that
the line of growth is contained within the lines of the ornamental leaves as they twist
and reach around the edges, and the strangely swollen bottom corners of the capital.
There is still a separation between form and function; the lines of action are not integral
to the action of the column. The column, although consumed by leafy growth, does not
quite embody the nature of the plant. The plant’s essence has been distilled into the
dynamic line of action, the line on which everything depends. In Ruskin’s depiction of a
portion of the facade of Ca’ Foscari in Venice, reproduced as Plate Eight in Seven Lamps,
things go further, the line goes deeper (Fig. 6.6). The lines of action exist within and give
form to the sweeping curves and startling points of the stone tracery, which channel
force, carrying the weight of the building’s facade through its veins and spines. The two
quatrefoils produce soft shapes, perfectly circular lines that generate the quiet foliation of
negative space so often discussed in relation to Gothic form, but this serene petal-like
element is vividly interrupted, almost pierced, by the intervening point of the ogee of
the arch beneath, and most of all by the echo of this ogee in the processed lines of stone
above it. The essence of Gothic—the pointed Gothic arch—is brought into being by the
convergence of two central veins, two touching thistle leaves. Looking closer at this
sharp point in the lines of stone: the dynamism of that sharp point is the energy of the
thistle in action. Everything depends on this. Gothic foliation generated in the negative
space by tracery is, we see vividly here, composed of, or rather configured by lifelines
that shape the form of the entire element. Sharp, barbed, piercing spines: lines of action
are the essence of the Gothic.
Metaphors, misalignment, and the gaps in language
must first be perceived and then extracted as an ‘entity’ in a process of ‘expansion and
delimitation’, accomplished by the viewer’s inner vision and active will.45 However, for
Spuybroek, the animation of the linear rib moves beyond its activation by the subject to
the ‘active form of support and transfer of loads rather than a simple form of resisting
forces’. The structure is active, and activity is life.46 This concept of active rigidity,
specified by Ruskin as an expression of Gothic architecture, developed by Worringer and
Ruskin consistently looked for the lines in nature, remarking that an observer of nature
must seize upon ‘every outline and colour’.47 Just at the process of drawing sharpened
Ruskin’s perceptions, he began to see in the natural forms and formations that he
was observing and subsequently drawing a kind of repetition of line and shape: the
expression of similar patterns within various natural phenomena. He expressed these
lines in a drawing he titled Abstract Lines, printed in the first volume of Stones (Fig. 6.7).
Various lines curl, twirl, and float across the page. Some lines are jagged, like the
topography of broken rocks or mountains, whilst others are supple and sinewy. Some
of the lines are continuous, whilst others bifurcate or branch repeatedly. These were
151
152
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Kelly Freeman
Fig. 6.7
R. P. Cuff after
John Ruskin,
Abstract Lines. Line
block, reproduced
in The Stones of
Venice 1 (1851).
Library Edition,
Plate Seven, facing
9.268. Photo: The
Courtauld Institute
of Art.
Ruskin’s lines of nature. In great cloud formations billowing through mountainous
regions, Ruskin saw the waves of the sea breaking against jagged rocks. The clouds
not only looked like waves in his drawings and watercolours, they were waves. In his
verbal accounts he also saw, for example, cresting waves on the floor of St Mark’s in
Venice.48 Such a resemblance of form linking natural phenomena and architecture
can be discerned in many of Ruskin’s drawings made during his European tours. The
process of drawing not only fostered associations between natural forms, it also enabled
Ruskin to develop the descriptive potential of metaphors in his writings, as he freely
applied metaphors to nature, art, and architecture.49 Elizabeth Helsinger contends that
Ruskin gave motion to the landscapes he described through the use of constant and
multiple verbs and verb forms so that ‘every element seems to vibrate or, more exactly,
to shimmer and scintillate in a dance of light’. Metaphor also played a key role in his
translation of the world into words. Certain metaphors dominate throughout Ruskin’s
works, particularly in his diaries and in Modern Painters. These metaphors provide the
manifestation of ‘inner energy’ to the objects in nature, such as fire, rock, and the sea—
all elements possessed of energy.50 Ruskin detected the living power or force felt in all
things, and made no sharp division between animate and inanimate nature. Light and
colour mark the presence of energy, be it energy expended through growth or energy
exhausted through decay.
Metaphors are, of course, always an integral part of language. Indeed, the
evolution of language is driven by an appropriation of our analogous memories of the
experienced material world in order to communicate new knowledge about the physical
and metaphysical world. This produces both an inadequacy and richness of language, as
words and their meanings change, intersect, and cross over. One method of overcoming
this inherent inadequacy is to invent new words.51 The other is to select a metaphor, an
easily recognisable term, and to deftly project and establish its meaning within a new
contextual framework. ‘Metaphoric translation’ wrote Mieka Bal ‘neutralises foreignness’,
something strange becomes familiar, something unknown becomes graspable via the use
of analogy and metaphor.52 However, there is always a ‘lack’ or ‘surplus’ in the image or
object in relation to words, argued Bal, which creates a gap between things—between
object and referent—just as in the spaces seen across a page of typed text. In this way, the
gap that separates two parts is essential for the production of meaning. Like the spaces
between words, the gaps are part of language and enable the possibilities of articulation.
The same could be said of articulating a skeleton from a pile of bones: the interval
between parts provides order and brings apparent wholeness to the chaos of disordered
bony material. Although metaphors may act to ‘neutralise foreignness’, Bal reminds us
that the gap between words and things always persists and it is important to keep it in
mind.
What is specific about Ruskin’s use of metaphor is the way he employed it to
draw connections between the natural world on the one hand and art and architecture
on the other. Mark Frost argues that ‘Ruskin did indeed attempt to ally conceptions
of environment drawn from Christianity, Romanticism, and science, but these were
incapable of stable conjunction’.53 Many of the novel or radical ‘sciences’ that found
traction in the nineteenth century relied on familiar analogies and metaphors in order
to explain what had newly been discovered. This also facilitated the broader acceptance
of ideas. The multifarious instability of nineteenth-century investigations of nature
begged for some sort of unifying essential theory within disparate fields of interrogation.
Ruskin’s determination to uncover ‘a natural realm, complete, coherent and unbroken’,
resulted in his frequent application of the same metaphors, which acted as a unifying
device in the simplest of terms.54 He used metaphors that conveyed the essence of
nature but that were also not fixed in a concrete homonymic form, thus enabling the
genesis of a variety of conceptual forms and an application within a variety of fields of
interrogation. The skeleton fit the bill entirely.
The mountain’s anatomy
From the jambs, wings, bones, spines, and ribs of the architectural body, the skeleton
metaphor was projected throughout Ruskin’s writings on architecture, art, geology,
and natural history. As we have seen, the skeleton was already an established metaphor,
used to indicate the bare outline or ‘essence’ of a thing.55 The term traversed the
physical, conceptual, and metaphysical realms and became the paradigm for extracting
the essential components to any system of thought—real or imagined—from which
something could be built upon. With the skeleton as recognised anatomical and
abstracted noun and metaphor, Ruskin was able to unite natural phenomena and
artifice by reducing everything down to an essential line which could then be threaded
through all things in nature, art, and architecture, in a manner similar to William Gilpin
(1724–1804) in his search for the lines of the picturesque, William Hogarth (1697–
1764) with his ‘line of beauty’, and Edmund Burke (1729–97) in his lines of sublimity.
Ruskin had read Hogarth and was almost certainly familiar with the work of Gilpin
and Burke (although their published contributions were absent from the inventory of
Ruskin’s library).56 In Ruskin’s work, the essential line was both real and conceptual. By
conceptual I mean that the visual recognition attributed to the metaphor has become
eroded and can at times be lost, for the very thing that identifies the noun—the threedimensional articulated bones—has become a two-dimensional line that may be
continuous or that may intersect and articulate with other lines.
Ruskin evokes the linearity of the skeleton metaphor dozens of times in his
writings on nature, art, and architecture. In volume two of Modern Painters, Ruskin
writes that ‘the fairer forms of earthly things are by [darkness] subdued and disguised,
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Fig. 6.8
John Ruskin,
Contour of the
Gorge of Ardon, in
the Valais (figure
17) and Order
of the Beds in
the Same (figure
18). Woodcuts,
reproduced in
Modern Painters
4 (1856). Library
Edition, figure 17,
6.193; figure 18,
6.194.
the round and muscular growth of the forest trunks is sunk into skeleton lines of quiet
shade’.57 In this instance, Ruskin presents the skeleton line as the lines of the tree
when shrouded in darkness, something closer to a shadowy platonic form than to a
material substance. The skeleton metaphor is now being used to describe conceptual
lines in nature. For Ruskin, the skeleton, now bereft of the materiality of bones, finds
its form being imagined in numerous other ways, its ‘lines’ now freed from substance
and implanted into the cracks and crevices of rocks and glaciers and in the topological
surface of mountainous landscape.58
In ‘The Laws of Hill Anatomy’ in the first volume of Modern Painters, the
dramatic, energised and expressive forms of the human body are contrasted and
conflated with the anatomy of the mountain:
Mountains are to the rest of the body of the earth, what violent muscular
action is to the body of man. The muscles and tendons of its anatomy are, in
the mountain, brought out with force and convulsive energy, full of expression,
passion, and strength; the plains and the lower hills are the repose and the
effortless motion of the frame, when its muscles lie dormant and concealed
beneath the lines of its beauty, yet ruling those lines in their every undulation.
This, then, is the first grand principle of the truth of the earth … But there is
this difference between the action of the earth, and that of a living creature;
that while the exerted limb marks its bones and tendons through the flesh, the
excited earth casts off the flesh altogether, and its bones come out from beneath.
Mountains are the bones of the earth … The masses of the lower hills are
laid over and against their sides, like the masses of lateral masonry against the
skeleton arch of an unfinished bridge.59
With contractive and forceful motions, the mountain’s bones cast off their flesh and
‘come out from beneath’, forming a titanic crust: an exoskeleton. But the skeleton
does not exist on the surface alone; like the laminar layering of bone itself, or, to use a
geological analogy, the layers of metamorphic rock formed from multiple lava flows, the
sequential lines of the mountain’s many endoskeletons tell of its age and its makeup. The
proverbial rib has been thrust into the body of the Earth, its skeleton now connected
to the anatomy of plants (such as in the description of the ribs of the burdock leaf ) and
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architecture (the skeleton arch of the bridge).
We can see early examples of Ruskin’s affinity towards hills and mountains (the
Alps especially) and bodily metaphor in his numerous boyhood poems, later published
in the collected work Poems, in 1891. In the text accompanying his poem ‘Chamouni’,
penned when he was but fourteen years old, Ruskin wrote that ‘the blue sky, shone
calmly through their openings, and the labouring sun struggled strangely—now
gleaming waterily on the red-ribbed skeleton crags’.60 Here, ‘the red-ribbed skeleton
crags’ are a visual metaphor for the lines of hematite in the rocks, their rusty hue a
testament to the oxidised iron—evidence of its breathing.61 In this way Ruskin took
from the skeleton its line and form, utilising its unique qualities as being strong yet
graceful, dead yet highly active when in the living body, and applied it to forms that
could also be deemed materially ambiguous. Introduced as part of Ruskin’s particular
observational and perceptive power, the skeleton became more than a metaphor in
Ruskin’s poems; it was the line which, although ghostly, was very much present and
which formed the skeleton of the mountain, and he develops this skeleton line in his
writing on mountains and glaciers. In the fourth volume of Modern Painters (1856),
Ruskin described foliated and sedimentary geological lines as ‘abstract’, in that they
follow the surface line of a rock’s topography or mountain’s terrain, and define the form
and mass of the three-dimensional shape of the rock or mountain in a single line. Ruskin
observed that this line was echoed in the layers of striated rock directly underneath. He
then illustrated these abstracted lines of differential and sequential rock formation and
referred to them as ‘skeleton lines’ (Fig. 6.8). In this way, surface and depth are unified
via metaphor, but also by the material lines that run through the heart of the mountain
echoing outwards and extending into the macrocosmic outline of the mountain’s surface,
thereby expressing the awesome temporality of geological time. The skeleton is thus
solidified as an important trope for Ruskin describing what he regarded as essential:
the extracted fundamental nature or ‘spirit’ of a thing, and its internal essence finding
external expression.
The skeleton in its linear form—the abstracted essential line—was also described
by Ruskin as the governing line (in regard to arboreal forms) and the ‘aweful line’ of
landscape, perhaps drawing inspiration from Gilpin and Burke and the sublime horror
of mountains.62 Ruskin believed that in identifying form, be it natural or manmade,
the aweful lines must be seized upon so that the essence of form—what is essential to
the form—can be grasped. The most beautiful lines, Ruskin asserted, are those found
in nature, ‘their universal property being that of ever-varying curvature in the most
subtle and subdued transitions, with peculiar expressions for motion, elasticity, or
dependence’.63 Such expressions are reminiscent of Hogarth’s line that ‘waves’ (the wavy
and the serpentine line) and Burke’s lines of beauty.64 This is, of course, what Ruskin
perceived in the Gothic line, too: two serpentine lines, tethered to two architectural
columns at both ends, connecting the two columns in a gentle yet energetic way at the
arch’s apex. The two lines want to find each other and their union is simply breathtaking.
The Gothic line is the Gothic arch, the spine of the lettuce thistle, the curve of a pair
of ribs connecting to a backbone, the jaw of an enormous whale, the rise and fall of the
mountain.
Yet, as we have seen, the skeleton metaphor transcends the metaphorical
and returns full circle so to speak, to become tied up in the physical matter of iron
hematite—a stain of its breath. As metaphors become material, I am reminded of
Ruskin’s conceptions of vibrant material transformation, as detailed in ‘The Law of
Help’. He also considered the broader transformation of matter over time, in which
the mountain was fed by its own ruin in an infinite cycle of erosion and deposition,
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decomposition and growth.65 In understanding the circular transformation of matter,
of infinite cycles of renewal, Ruskin was certainly thinking ecologically. But what is
particularly interesting here is that Ruskin was able to take the abstract line and give
it material form as oxidised iron, which acted as both evidence of the mountain’s age
but also of its vibrant and vital material transformation, a material that breathes. It is
the golden stain of time, the rust in the fountain, the blood generated in our bones.
Iron becomes part of a self-sustaining circulation of matter, and the skeleton of bone,
abstracted into a metaphorical line, becomes materialised once more as a skeleton of
iron.66
‘The prickliness of its leaf becomes at last its grace’
We are quite familiar with Ruskin’s constant effort to make connections between art,
natural philosophy, geology, and architecture. What is so striking, however, is his
choice of the skeleton as his unifying concept. The skeleton can be seen as an essential
line, a line abstracted from both the surface and the interior of the mountain, and
which signifies the mountain’s form, age, and material. Elizabeth Helsinger argued
that, for Ruskin, ‘the metaphors express visual information important to the paintertopographer in the form of a strong distinctive impression, a central thought that is the
mark of imaginative vision’.67 Yet the metaphor of the skeleton gave more than a strong
impression, and it was less imaginative than other poetic metaphors and pathetic fallacies
employed by writers and poets.68 The term invokes the very essence of a thing; the very
lines of its makeup, the essence of its structure.
The skeleton is a true Gothic concept, a form of delicacy and strength, of nature
and life: savage, changeful, natural, grotesque, rigid, and redundant. It acts in service
to the internal elements made by the craftsmen who actively articulate the nature of
the stone, following the will of the line: the Gothic rib, configured into a skeleton. I
have spent much time meditating on the work of the Gothic craftsmen, bending to
the will of the lines they carve. In this act of servitude, there is a figurative offering of
oneself to the will of the stone. However, stone is unconscious material and as such
there is a subconscious reflection of the craftsman’s own will at the point where mind
and material meet, at the point of contact between the surface of the stone and the
blade of the chisel. In perceiving the Gothic figure as we do, we become connected to
the craftsman as they too perceived the line. Through them, we find ourselves reflected
back. Our will and the Gothic line are one and the same. Emotional motivation drives
the craftsman’s composition. As Ruskin says in ‘The Task of the Least’ in Modern Painters
5 (1860), it is this human motive ‘to which all its lines and forms have some relation’.69
Their motivation is not to create something imperfect; as Ruskin asserted, the craftsmen
do not aim to make mistakes, but their results are always imperfect. Just as we are
imperfect, so too is the Gothic line open to misalignment and unique imperfection.
It is where beauty is to be found, and where relation with ourselves, with each other
and to the architecture of the past, resides, in the recognition of our own imperfect
wills. ‘Imperfection is in some sort essential to all what we know of life’.70 The skeleton,
and its associated parts, can be utilised to trace and understand connection in Ruskin.
Metaphors are a way of connecting the visual with the communicable. The skeleton
metaphor was employed by Ruskin to conterminously pull together as well as pull apart
ideas; to ‘articulate’ concepts as well as to dismember them, and to create structured and
congruent arguments that consistently refer to the relationship of part to whole.
In a similar manner that a skeleton is an assemblage of parts brought together
and united to form a whole, Ruskin drew together physical and metaphysical lines to
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compose relational systems—systems comprised of earth elements, nature, affect, and
divinity—that when articulated together, transcended the sum of their individual parts.
Ruskin’s aim for organic unity in architecture—architectural organicism―played out
through the Gothic craftsmen, foliated plant and arboreal forms, and the articulation
of Gothic members into a holistic architectural skeleton. Life is found in the relation
of the organism to its organs, an interrelation of its parts to the whole. The parts of
the living organism relate and correlate with each other. The skeleton line indicates
an understanding of the part as being essential to the whole in a micro-/macrocosmic
dynamic: the part is the whole and the whole is the part. Ruskin understood the skeleton
as the essential structural part to the living body, and that life and death were forever
intertwined, for what is life but a progress towards death.71 It may be, however, that the
skeleton line became too abstracted from the living body, and perhaps its organic origins
become blurred and potentially overshadowed by mid-nineteenth-century debates
concerning natural history and comparative anatomy, which may have led to its rapid
disuse in Ruskin’s metaphorical ‘toolkit’ in favour of more ‘helpful’, quick, and lifeaffirming metaphors from the natural world.72
For Ruskin, ‘help’ meant putting things together, composing lines, to make a
single thing out of them, something greater than the sum of its parts. Competition,
anarchy, corruption, and separation were the laws of death. It was perhaps the skeleton’s
essential nature, of being articular, that led to its downfall. As easily fragmentable,
there is an embodied violence to the skeleton, a disarticulate nature that misaligned
with Ruskin’s sense of natural and living wholeness. The decline of Ruskin’s use of the
skeleton metaphor may have been a result of its relationship to death and Darwinian
theories, its rejection in favour of more obvious associations with living nature, rather
than a box of bones or artificially rearticulated representations in museums.73 Although
Ruskin called upon ‘Mr Darwin’ many times in Proserpina and Love’s Meinie, it was in
service of communicating species variation and evolution, not in relation to natural
selection and death. The idea of life as a struggle for survival, a competition, a predatorprey relationship, a striving to seek the advantage, and the idea that death was the
outcome of life in every instance, painted a bleak picture of nature and creation for
Ruskin. He therefore remained at fundamental loggerheads with Darwin, not just
regarding the idea of sexual selection, from the 1860s until the end of his life. Ruskin
did concede that interspecies variation and development occurred, although he was not
convinced of the impetus being the drives of pure survival.
This could be one of the reasons that the skeleton metaphor was utilised less
and less by Ruskin in the years subsequent to the publication of On the Origin of Species
in 1859. Its association with death could not be overcome, the metaphor was now
complicit with modernity, and every city in England, every town, became furnished
with a vast prefabricated metal skeleton frame: sad, dead, beached whales, vast railway
stations on empty squares, soulless ‘black skeletons and blinding square’.74 As the
nineteenth century wore on, the skeleton lost its associations with life, so that, to put it
into the terms of Modern Painters 2 (1846), the Promethean sculptor / Gothic mason
becomes an uncaring anatomist with dissecting tools in hand: ‘while the sculptor ceases
not to feel, to the close of his life, the deliciousness of every line of the outward frame’,
‘the anatomist’, in his dissecting work, ‘in a little time loses all sense of horror in the
torn flesh and carious bone’, the envelope ripped open to expose the deathly white stuff
within.75 The physical skeleton removed from or exposed at the expense of the living
body cast a grim shadow over the application of the skeleton metaphor to living natural
forms, and you’d be hard pressed to find it used to describe geological striations in any
twentieth-century book on natural history.
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158
Fig. 6.9
G. Allen after
John Ruskin,
Acanthoid Leaves.
Steel engraving,
reproduced in
Proserpina 1 (1875).
Library Edition,
Plate Twelve, facing
25.289.
Kelly Freeman
The Osteological Line
Yet the skeleton is not completely interred in this collective phantasmagoria.
Ruskin wanted to keep the skeleton—or at least the thistle—alive. I will come now,
at the end of my chapter, to where I began, to Ruskin drawing thistles. In Proserpina,
Ruskin returns to the plant, describing it as a ‘composed’ flower, ‘being, on the whole,
bossy instead of flat’.76 In the stunning, rather stately and somewhat playful Plate
Twelve titled Acanthoid Leaves accompanying this description, Ruskin sketched two
long, uprooted, marsh thistle stems cupping another thistle leaf in the centre of the page
(Fig. 6.9). Ruskin points out that the same sprig of thistle was used to draw the lateral
stems, whilst the central figure was a ‘young leaf just opening. It beat me, in its delicate
bossing, and I had to leave it, discontentedly enough’. He describes in detail the drawing
process:
sketched first with a finely-pointed pen, and common ink, on white paper: then
washed rapidly with colour, and retouched with the pen to give sharpness and
completion. This method is used because the thistle leaves are full of complex
and sharp sinuosities, and set with intensely sharp spines passing into hairs,
which require many kinds of execution with the fine point to imitate at all.77
Fig. 6.10
G. Allen after
John Ruskin,
Crested Leaves:
Lettuce-Thistle.
Steel engraving,
reproduced in
Proserpina 1 (1875).
Library Edition,
Plate Thirteen,
facing 25.290.
Ruskin is adamant that the sharp sinuosities and spines of the thistle must be captured
for its true form to be realised. The spines of the laterally positioned thistles come
together to create an inverted arch, like two bony ribs, albeit pathological with spindles
of ossified tissue projecting outwards from the various grooves and sulci. The two thistle
spines also resemble the antlers of a great stag, its points echoed in the fierce barbs of
the thistle’s sharp edges. Ruskin, too, saw bones in the stiff folds of the thistle leaf, their
action like that ‘of a ship’s spars on its sails; and absolutely in many cases like that of the
spines in a fish’s fin, passing into the various conditions of serpentine and dracontic crest,
connected with all the terrors and adversities of nature’. Lines of action, lines of strength,
lines of warning. The true nature of the thistle lies in its fierceness. ‘The prickliness of
its leaf becomes at last its grace’.78 The subsequent Plate Thirteen titled Crested Leaves:
Lettuce-Thistle (Fig. 6.10) is described by Ruskin as being of an easier variety to capture
due to its many soft planes of ‘succulent and membranous surface’ and the singular
‘definite outlines, and merely undulating folds; and this is sufficiently done by a careful
and firm pen outline on grey paper, with a slight wash of colour afterwards, reinforced
in the darks; then marking the lights with white … it is much the best which the general
student can adopt for expression of the action and muscular power of plants’. Inspired
by Study with a Lettuce Thistle, Plate Thirteen is a portrait of living nature, its leaves
twisting upward in a tell-tale spiral of asymmetrical growth. The thistle is composed of
multiple lines of action: the upright rigid lines of the stalk, the central veins of the leaves
as they project outwards, the soft rounded lines of the thistle head. The forceful, vital,
active lineation is realised in the spinous prickles of the leaves facing left, right, and left
again, before reaching the bloom of the thistle at its head. For Ruskin the skeletal—the
essential—line still persists as a fundamental truth, and in de-aestheticising the skeleton,
he says, modern science misses out much. ‘You will find a thousand botanical drawings
which will give you a delicate and deceptive resemblance of the leaf, for one that will
give you the right convexity in its backbone’. ‘The goodness or badness of such work
depends absolutely on the truth of the single line’.79
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank my coeditor and collaborator, Thomas Hughes, and my mentor and
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friend, Mechthild Fend. Thanks also to Chris Donaldson and Sandra Kemp for inviting
me to present an earlier draft of this chapter at The Ruskin—Library, Museum and
Research Centre, University of Lancaster.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
Ruskin may have misidentified the variety of thistle: the
shape of the leaves look more like a Scotch or milk thistle
than a Lettuce thistle, the edges of which are flat and relatively spineless. The leaves are edible and taste remarkably
like lettuce, hence their name.
Ruskin, 25.287 (Proserpina 1, 1875).
Mark Frost, ‘Reading Nature: John Ruskin, Environment,
and the Ecological Impulse’, in Laurence W. Mazzeno
and Ronald D. Morrison (eds.), Victorian Writers and the
Environment: Ecocritical Perspectives (Abingdon and New
York: Routledge, 2017), p. 18. See also Ruskin, 15.91 (The
Elements of Drawing, 1857).
Ruskin, 15.91.
Ruskin, 9.268 (The Stones of Venice 1, 1851).
Mark Frost, ‘The Everyday Marvels of Rust and Moss:
John Ruskin and the Ecology of the Mundane’, Green
Letters 14 (2011): pp. 10–22.
Frost, ‘The Everyday Marvels of Rust and Moss’, p. 11.
Ruskin, 25.60–3 (Love’s Meinie, 1873–81).
Ruskin, 35.314 (Praeterita 2, 1886–7).
The fifth volume of Modern Painters was divided into three
sections: on art and the physical and material facts, on art
and its obedience to the laws of beauty, and on art and
its relation to God and man. The last division was titled
‘The Law of Help’. See Ruskin, 7.203 (Modern Painters 5,
1860).
Allen MacDuffie argues that Ruskin’s interest in ‘energy
as a property of a system’ and his description of biophysical energy exchanges between humans, environmental
systems, economics and aesthetics, sets him apart from his
contemporaries. ‘Ruskin’s vision of energy is comprehensively ecological’, writes MacDuffie, ‘since it involves not
simply a consideration of natural systems, but the manifold, shifting, strange, unbounded zones of interchange
among natural formations, cultural productions, working
conditions, modes of economic organisation, transportation networks, and human-constructed environments’. See
MacDuffie, Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological
Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2014), pp. 137–38.
Ruskin, 7.215.
Ruskin, 7.204.
Ruskin, 7.205.
Ruskin, 7.205.
Ruskin, 7.206–7. Also see Clive Wilmer, ‘“No Such Thing
as a Flower … No Such Thing as a Man”: John Ruskin’s
Response to Darwin’, in Valerie Purton (ed.), Darwin,
Tennyson and Their Readers: Explorations in Victorian Literature (London: Anthem Press, 2014), pp. 97–108.
Ruskin, 7.207. For the definition of ‘Articulation, n.’, see
OED Online (Oxford University Press, 2017).
My interpretation is similar to the way Jeremy Melius
describes the sense of relations between parts, or the
‘relationships’ perceived in artworks, as ‘chains of feeling’
in which a hierarchy of affection can be discerned and
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
linked through chain-like connections. In a sense I am
interested in the links of the chain, and how Ruskin traces
these articulations with the osteological line. See Melius’s
chapter in this book.
Ruskin, 25.324–5 (Proserpina 1, 1875): ‘the animal’s limb
bends at the joints, but the vegetable limb stiffens. And
when the articulation projects as in the joint of a cane,
it means not only that the strength of the plant is well
carried through the junction, but is carried farther and
more safely than it could be without it: a cane is stronger,
and can stand higher than it could otherwise, because of
its joints’.
Frost, ‘Reading Nature’, pp. 15–18.
John Ruskin to Charles Eliot Norton, Ambleside, 8
August 1867, reproduced in Jeffrey L. Spear, ‘“My darling
Charles”: Selections from the Ruskin-Norton Correspondence’, in John Dixon Hunt and Faith M. Holland
(eds.), The Ruskin Polygon: Essays on the Imagination of John
Ruskin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982),
p. 245.
Paul Walton was unable to identify the particular drawing
of the tree that Ruskin described in Praeterita. See Paul H.
Walton, The Drawings of John Ruskin (Hacker: New York,
1985), p. 60.
Ruskin, 3.200–1 (Modern Painters 1, 1843).
Ruskin, 9.91 (The Stones of Venice 1, 1851). For the application of abstract lines in decoration and the transference
of natural contours to architecture, see pp. 266–70. For
the abstraction of mountain lines, see pp. 335, 339–40.
For the governing lines in trees, see pp. 91–6, 116.
Ruskin, 9.388. On classical Greek architecture’s association with the lintel, see Ruskin, 10.252 (The Stones of Venice 2, 1853). The fact that Ruskin used this analogy with
zoology is telling. He was well informed of recent debates
and breakthroughs in such fields as comparative anatomy,
zoology, palaeontology, geology, and botany, as is evidenced by the contents of his personal library and his correspondences with leading figures in science, such as the
zoologist and palaeontologist Richard Owen (who made
important contributions to comparative anatomy) and the
geologist Charles Lyell (whom Ruskin had also met). An
amateur naturalist himself, Ruskin would later write his
own treatises on birds (Love’s Meinie, 1873–81), flora (Proserpina, 1875–86), and mountains (‘Of Mountain Beauty’
in Modern Painters 4, 1856) becoming a recognised and
respected voice in ornithology and geology. Ruskin carried
Georges Cuvier’s Le Règne Animal (The Animal Kingdom,
1816) with him whilst traveling through Italy, being perhaps more sympathetic with Cuvier’s Catastrophe theory
over the secular debates regarding Lamarckian evolution
due to his Evangelical beliefs. There are many traces of
Cuvier in Ruskin’s rhetoric, descriptions, terminology
and metaphor. Ruskin’s notable references to Cuvier were
discussed by Mark Frost in his 2005 thesis, ‘“The Law of
Help”: John Ruskin’s Ecological Vision, 1843–1886’ (PhD
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
diss., University of Southampton, 2005), p. 127.
On foliate forms in Gothic architecture, see Ruskin,
10.256–8.
Ruskin, 9.30.
Ruskin, 9.4.
Ruskin, 10.182 (The Stones of Venice 2, 1853).
Ruskin, 10.183.
Georges Cuvier argued that movement was a condition of
life. See Cuvier, The Animal Kingdom, Arranged According
to its Organisation by Baron Georges Cuvier [1816], (trans.)
E. Blyth et al. (London: William Clowes, 1827), p. 16.
‘Active rigidity’ is defined in Ruskin’s ‘The Nature of
Gothic’ as the fifth of his six tenets of Gothic architecture.
Ruskin, 10.239.
Ruskin, 10.239. Also see Nikolaus Pevsner, Ruskin and
Viollet-le-Duc: Englishness and Frenchness in the Appreciation of Gothic Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson,
1969), p. 24.
Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72) is often referred to as ‘the
father of architecture’. I would consider him to be the first
theorist in Western architecture to have directly addressed
the skeletal elements in a building’s anatomy and would
argue that he conceived of these elements as being alive.
See Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria [1452], On
the Art of Building in Ten Books, (trans.) Joseph Rykwert,
Neil Leach and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge MA: MIT
Press, 1991). Also see Caspar Pearson, Humanism and the
Urban World: Leon Battista Alberti and the Renaissance City
(Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2011).
For Ruskin’s analogies between architecture and the animal
skeleton, see Ruskin, 9.128, 295 (The Stones of Venice 1,
1851).
George Witt, A Compendium of Osteology: Being a Systematic Treatise of the Bones of the Human Body; Designed
for the Use of Students; to Which Is Subjoined an Improved
Method of Preparing Bones for Osteological Purposes (London: Longman & Co., 1833).
Ruskin, 25.232–3 (Proserpina 1, 1875–86).
Alfred Bartholomew, ‘Of Abutments’, in Specifications for
Practical Architecture (London: J. Williams & Co., 1840),
chapter 52.
Although the stones remain in place, it is not due to their
physical inertia but through a maintained state of ‘static
equilibrium’. Any alteration to the state of static equilibrium would result in catastrophic structural failure. Jacques
Heyman, The Stone Skeleton: Structural Engineering of
Masonry Architecture (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), pp. 16, 79.
Lars Spuybroek imagines a digital Gothic city composed
of architectural designs that follow the writings of Ruskin
by affirming the Gothic style as an interpretation of the
organic: as a living, ‘foliated’ form that exists in a continuous process of formation. See The Sympathy of Things:
John Ruskin and the Ecology of Design [2011] (London:
Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 5.
Spuybroek, The Sympathy of Things, pp. 11, 15. Wilhelm Worringer proposed that the structure becomes
‘vitalised’ at its moment of production. See Abstraction and
Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style [1908],
(trans.) Michael Bullock (Chicago: I van R. Dee, 1997),
pp. 94–95, 112.
Spuybroek, The Sympathy of Things, pp. 9, 28.
Lars Spuybroek, ‘Gothic Ontology and Sympathy:
Moving Away from the Fold’, in Sjoerd van Tuinen (ed.),
Speculative Art Histories: Analysis at the Limit (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2017), pp. 143, 146, 152.
Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, pp. 76–7, 112–21.
See also Spuybroek, The Sympathy of Things, p. 28.
Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, p. 5.
Spuybroek, The Sympathy of Things, p. 5. In his thesis,
Worringer wrote that ‘life is activity. But activity is that
in which I experience an expenditure of energy. By its
nature, this activity is an activity of will’. See Worringer,
Abstraction and Empathy, p. 5.
Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1982),
pp. 24–5. See also Ruskin, 3.253–8 (Modern Painters 1,
1843).
Ruskin, 10.62, 88, 162 (The Stones of Venice 2, 1853).
Being an exceptionally influential writer and art critic,
Ruskin’s organic metaphors were quickly absorbed into the
descriptive and critical language of the day. See Stephen
Kite, ‘Building Texts + Reading: Metaphor, Memory, and
Material in John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice’, Library
Trends 61 (2012): pp. 418–39; and Helsinger, Ruskin and
the Art of the Beholder.
Helsinger, Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder, pp. 31–2.
Jay Appleton has discussed the historical problems that
have arisen in the discourse of landscapes, paying attention
to the confusion that can be generated from an author’s
implementation of common adjectives as abstract nouns.
See Jay Appleton, The Experience of Landscape (Chichester:
John Wiley & Sons, 1996), pp. 18–21.
Mieke Bal, A Mieke Bal Reader (Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 152–61.
For Ruskin’s conception of ‘ecosystem’ see Frost, ‘The
Everyday Marvels of Rust and Moss’, p. 13.
Frost, ‘The Everyday Marvels of Rust and Moss’, p. 10.
The noun ‘skeleton’ is reported to have been first recorded
c.1600, which is where such terms as ‘skeleton crew’
(1778) and ‘skeleton key’ derive their meaning. See
Douglas Harper, ‘Skeleton’, in Online Etymology Dictionary (2001), accessed 1 September 2020, http://www.
etymonline.com/index.php?term=skeleton. Excluding ship
and bridge building, I have never seen the term skeleton
applied in architectural discourse in the centuries preceding the 1800s. However, the rich metaphorical potential of
terms like ‘skeleton’ makes it impossible to trace precisely
when the meaning of a particular word was transposed,
when, in other words, a skeleton made of bone became a
skeleton made of stone, iron and, in due course, steel. I do
not propose that the material skeletons of bone and iron
were considered to be the same thing. On the contrary, the
metaphor is a figure of speech, and looking at the skeleton
as a metaphor implies that it is both different from and
analogous to the unit made of animal bones. Bodily
analogies are a legacy from early-modern ways of thinking
about the body and the world as connected, and do not
always imply a causal relationship. See Michel Foucault,
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
(London: Routledge, 2002), p. 56.
Ruskin owned a copy of the Reverend John Trusler’s The
Works of William Hogarth in a Series of Engravings (1833).
He also owned copies of J. Hannay, J. Trusler, and E. F.
Roberts’s The Complete Works of William Hogarth (1833),
Austin Dobson’s William Hogarth (1891) as well as
other ephemera relating to Hogarth. See Ruskin Library
Catalogue, Lancaster University (2009), accessed 2 June
2020, http://onesearch.lancaster-university.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=RUS_VU1&reset
_config=true. George P. Landow reveals how Ruskin had
assimilated Burke’s aesthetics, responding to them in
Modern Painters. However, Landow’s position is that there
was no evidence that Ruskin knew the writings of William
Gilpin. See Landow, Aesthetic and Critical Theory of John
Ruskin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971),
pp. 220–39, and passim.
Ruskin, 4.80 (Modern Painters 2, 1846).
Ruskin, 6.366–466.
Ruskin, 3.427–8 (Modern Painters 1, 1843). See section 4:
‘Of Truth of Earth’, chapter 1: ‘Of General Structure’.
Ruskin, 2.381 (Poems, ‘On tour on the continent’, 1891).
Ruskin, 16.394 (The Two Paths, 1859: Lecture 5, ‘The
Work of Iron, in Nature, Art and Policy’, 16 February
1858). See also Kelly Freeman, ‘Iron and Bone: The
Skeleton Architecture of the Oxford University Museum
of Natural History’, Object 18:1 (2016): pp. 9–44.
Edmund Burke, On the Sublime and Beautiful [1757]
(Boston: The Harvard Classics, 1909–14), and William
Gilpin, Observations relative chiefly to the Picturesque
161
163
Kelly Freeman
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
Beauty, made in the year 1772 on several parts of England;
particularly the mountains and lakes of Cumberland and
Westmoreland, two volumes (London: Blamire, 1786),
vol. 1, p. 191.
Ruskin, 9.267 (The Stones of Venice 1, 1851).
William Hogarth dubbed this the line of beauty and the
line of grace. See Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty: Written
with a View of Fixing the Fluctuating Ideas of Taste (London: Samuel Bagster, 1753).
Ruskin, 6.239 (Modern Painters 4, 1856).
Ella Mershon, ‘Ruskin’s Dust’, Victorian Studies 58:3
(2016): pp. 469–70, 476, 479–80. See also Catherine
Gallagher, The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation
in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 100–7.
Helsinger, Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder, p. 32.
Ruskin’s ‘pathetic fallacy’ can be summarised as poetic
fancy, or emotional distortion introduced in the description of the appearance of things: ‘All violent feelings have
the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our
impressions of external things, which I would generally
characterize as the “pathetic fallacy”’. See Ruskin, 5.205
(Modern Painters 3, 1843, ‘Of the Pathetic Fallacy’).
Ruskin takes the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge as an
example: ‘The one red leaf, the last of its clan; that dances
as often as dance it can’. Ruskin explains that Coleridge
fancies that the leaf has a life and a will of its own. Yet
a dying leaf is powerless—it does not choose to ‘dance’.
There is also the contradistinct substitution of death with
merriment, and the wind with music (5.206–7). See
also Landow, Aesthetic and Critical Theory of John Ruskin,
pp. 321–457, especially pp. 378–87.
Ruskin, 7.217 (Modern Painters 5, 1860).
Ruskin, 10.35 (The Stones of Venice 2, 1853).
Ruskin, 4.474 (Modern Painters 2, 1843): ‘When you say a
growing thing, therefore, you mean something advancing
towards death’.
Ruskin, 4.155. See also the letter to Dean Liddell, 1 Dec
1878, quoted in Ruskin, 25.xxx: ‘Man is intended to
observe with his eyes, and mind; not with microscope
and knife’. Also see Dinah Birch, “‘That Ghastly Work”:
Ruskin, Animals and Anatomy’, in Laurence W. Mazzeno
and Ronald D. Morrison (eds.), Victorian Literature and
Culture: Contexts for Criticism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and Wilmer, ‘“No Such Thing as a Flower
… No Such Thing as a Man”: John Ruskin’s Response to
Darwin’, pp. 97–108.
In short, Darwin’s theory was a theory of adaptation in
that small changes in initial conditions for life can have
amplified effects. The expression of form is environmentally dependent and the most favourable expression for
an animal’s particular environment will be selected. The
evolution of species is thus based on selected traits that are
natural (pressures exerted by nature) and sexual (pressures
of selecting mates that can produce live, healthy offspring
with a survival advantage). See Charles Darwin, On the
Origin of Species [1859], in Paul H Barrett (ed.), The
Works of Charles Darwin, twenty-nine volumes (London:
Routledge, 2016).
Ruskin, 26.349 (The Two Paths, 1859: Lecture 4, ‘The Influence of Imagination in Architecture’, 23 January 1857).
Ruskin, 4.68–9 (Modern Painters 2, 1846: Section 1: Of
the Theoretic Faculty, Chapter 4 ‘Of false opinions’).
Ruskin, 25.292 (Proserpina 1, 1875).
Ruskin, 25.289.
Ruskin, 25.289. In the footnote on p. 280 is written:
‘On a printed proof, among other matter intended for
St Mark’s Rest [Ruskin, 10.163 (The Stones of Venice 2,
1853)], is the following additional passage on the subject:
“Now, lastly, of the Thistle, more strictly the Acanthus.
The prickliness of its leaf becomes at last its grace, so that
of all leaves it is chosen at last for its Gratia by the Masters
of working nations, and chosen, according to their tradition, in that Corinth where the Greek wisdom, or sophia,
was to have her final obedience rendered to her”’.
79.
Ruskin, 25.90.
Forms of
Intermediate
Being
JEREMY MELIUS
7