Return to Victorian Literature & Culture Syllabus/Home Page
Commentaries: Introduction | Carlyle | Mill | E. B. Browning | Brontë | Tennyson | Mayhew | Ruskin | R. Browning | Arnold | Stevenson | Pre-Raphaelites Intro | D. G. Rossetti | C. Rossetti | Hopkins | Pater | Wilde
Notes on Modern Painters (1843-60)
“Painting . . . is nothing but a noble and expressive language….” And “It is not by the mode of representing and saying, but by what is represented and said, that the respective greatness either of the painter or the writer is to be finally determined” (465). Ruskin demands accuracy in a painter, but merely technical ability is not enough. Painting is an expressive art, and it’s the quality and intensity of the expression that matters above all else. Ruskin is a belated Romantic in this regard.
The best art, according to Ruskin, is that which “conveys to the mind of the spectator, by any means whatsoever, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.” He continues, “I call an idea great in proportion as it is received by a higher faculty of the mind, and as it more fully occupies, and in occupying, exercises and exalts, the faculty by which it is received” (465). The “ideas” referenced here are not logical constructions; they are more like a species of the sublime, another Romantic affinity of Ruskin’s.
With regard to Turner’s 1840 painting “The Slave Ship,” Ruskin’s description gives us his own impression of the painting, which involves a sense of the sublimity evoked by the scene’s eerie use of color and light and its apocalyptic overtones. This isn’t to say that Ruskin advocates mere impressionism—he surely believes that Turner’s painting has special qualities that demand the attention of a trained eye and a refined spirit. Critics must be accurate in this sense, just as the painter must in some fashion paint the subject truly. Turner’s painting isn’t merely mimetic or didactic, it is profoundly imaginative. The painting is an instance of sublimity, and Ruskin’s prose tries to honor it on its own terms.
So what does the painting convey? Well, Ruskin doesn’t talk about the painting’s thesis or argument insofar as a painting constitutes an argument (i.e. slavery is a moral evil, etc.); he describes light, color, and the relations between one part of the painting and another, and tries to catch the emotive effects generated by these things. I would suggest that “the power, majesty, and deathfulness of the open, deep, illimitable Sea” (466) is the main “idea” to be conveyed: a power linked to the infinite horror of what the slavers have done since their actions reveal the depths of human depravity.
Notes on “The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century” (1884)
“It is a malignant quality of wind, unconnected with any one quarter of the compass; it blows indifferently from all. . . . It always blows tremulously, making the leaves of the trees shudder as if they were all aspens . . .” (not in our edition). The wind Ruskin describes is eerie—one can’t tell where it comes from or where it is going; it is chaotic. This is not the powerful, inspiriting wind of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.” This breeze is correspondent with something, but not with imagination.
“And now I come to the most important sign of the plague-wind and the plague-cloud: that in bringing on their peculiar darkness, they blanch the sun instead of reddening it. And here I must note briefly to you the uselessness of observation by instruments, or machines, instead of eyes” (not in our edition). Ruskin sums up his argument: “Blanched Sun,—blighted grass,—blinded man . . .” (328). The Sun here seems to resemble Blake’s “Guinea Sun” from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Modern sensibilities can’t explain it—as Blake would say, we need to look “through the eye and not with it.” We need a moral framework from Christian history and theology to interpret such a wind. We are deaf and blind to it because it is our own morally debased element now. As a latter-day prophet, Ruskin employs a Christian framework in a Romantic way: he wants to revitalize human perception and thereby help people regain moral intelligibility. One function of a prophet is to confront people with the fact that they don’t live according to their own stated ethics; i.e. that they are morally dead and hypocritical in their professed virtues.
The key point of the current essay is that we are fast creating a world that we are powerless to understand or interpret. So Ruskin gives us fragmented impressions of the weather, suffusing those fragments with moral significance and challenging us to make a spiritualized reading that alone can put them together.
On the practicality or efficacy of the argument he makes, we may well have mixed feelings. To be fair, what probably seemed at the time an indication of near madness on Ruskin’s part now sounds a lot less irrational, given the danger posed by a rapidly heating world. It’s common today, when conversations about global warming take place on the Internet or in print, for progressive advocates to adopt something like Ruskin’s tone and offer prophetic warnings against the evils of excessive or misguided consumption.
We are sometimes told, that is, that the only thing we can do is drastically reduce our consumption rates, buying only what we really need. But such rhetoric ignores the brute fact that capitalist societies are all about excess: the market is sustained not be need but by desire, and would no doubt collapse if we scaled our purchases back to the level of need. Conservative politicians have been guilty of more or less ignoring the problem or paying only lip service to it, while more progressive politicians insist that greening the economy will in fact be profitable, once it catches on. That may be so, but progress on this front seems painfully slow.
If we manage to get ourselves out of the mess we have made, or at least make it less disastrous than it might have been, it won’t be because we drastically curtailed consumption but rather because we dealt with a technology-induced mess by means of still more technology, this time wisely applied rather than pell-mell. One thing is certain: the old nineteenth-century and earlier view that nature is a an endless supply of resources is not tenable and hasn’t been for quite some time. There are too many people on the planet doing too many destructive things for that view to prevail with anything less than horrible consequences.
Notes on The Stones of Venice (1851-53)
Ruskin, a mid-Victorian sage-writer, says that England’s current course in economics and empire parallels the fall of Venice when that city entered its decadent Renaissance phase during the Quattrocento: soulless perfection in architecture and art, lewdness in morals, shamelessness in pursuit of monetary wealth. At base, pride goes before a fall: we are fallen enough already, and there’s no need to keep repeating our arrogant rebelliousness and claim autonomy from God, argues Ruskin.
In this, Ruskin is a disciple of Carlyle, another conservative prophet raging in the wilderness, offering at one time threats, at another salvation. He is a moralist who interprets architectural history and technique as an embodiment of a given culture’s moral status. He treats paintings and social forms in much the same way, reading them as expressions of a society’s spiritual health or morbidity.
In Stones, Ruskin demonstrates that Gothic feudalism encouraged workers to express their individual spirit in a way that did honor to the Church. Labor is central to fallen human beings. The way back to a right appreciation of God is mediation, accommodation, humility, and striving that doesn’t try to rival God as our creator and source. So the critic and consumer must interpret the products of labor with their expressive quality in mind. Critics and consumers must grasp the need for striving worthy of redemption, labor directed heavenward.
Why does Ruskin favor architecture in particular? Buildings are works of art that we experience, live in, gather in. And Gothic workers were building cathedrals, which are communal expressions of humility before God, so they resist the urge to rebuild the Tower of Babel of Genesis, for which God confounded the builders’ speech.
The “moral elements” of Gothic are as follows: savageness, changefulness, naturalism, grotesqueness, rigidity, and redundance. With regard to the builders, these categories translate to savageness, love of change, love of nature, disturbed imagination, obstinacy, and generosity. Gothic architecture expresses the workers’ mental tendencies, and the result of their work—often cathedrals—was intended to be a dwelling-place for and offering to God. A church (the visible or assembled body of the faithful) is, after all, an expression of human aspirations to connect with the divine, and a locus of spiritual community.
“And when that fallen roman, in the utmost importance of his luxury, and insolence of his guilt, became the model for the imitation of civilized Europe, at the close of the so-called Dark ages, the word Gothic became a term of unmitigated contempt. . .” (not in our edition). A consumer is an interpreter, a critic (on this point, see also Unto This Last), but the insolent, prideful, complacent Renaissance patron, insists Ruskin, wanted and saw only soulless perfection, and what had been a serious kind of grotesqueness became merely obscene because that’s what the corrupt patrons wanted.
Genuine grotesque art flows from the labor of a spirit in tension, confronting the shocks and extreme contradictions in life—death and terror, the fantastic, the ludicrous. Mere obscenity is cynical and materialistic, by contrast.
Ruskin elaborates on servile, constitutional, and revolutionary forms of art. Of the first, the principal types are “the Greek, Ninevite, and Egyptian.” Greek architectural style achieves a balance, calm, rest, and self-sufficiency, but with respect to the workers who made the buildings, says Ruskin, “The Greek gave to the lower workman no subject which he could not perfectly execute” (471). But with constitutional ornament, he writes, things are otherwise: in the “Christian … system of ornament, this slavery is done away with altogether; Christianity having recognized, in small things as well as great, the individual value of every soul” (472). The essence of it is striving.
As for revolutionary ornament, its makers and consumers are selfish, fixated on trivial things done to material perfection. An eye fixed on this kind of ornament is debased—as Blake would say, “a fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.” Priorities here are turned upside down, and buildings are not offerings to God but monuments to the artist’s or patron’s ego. In this sense, Ruskin construes the Renaissance as a second fall in which people deployed mere technical skill and science to try to overcome the effects of the original fall in Eden, and of course he sees England going down the same path, in search of a false capitalist utopia.
“[I]t is, perhaps, the principal admirableness of the Gothic schools of architecture, that they thus receive the results of the labor of inferior minds, and out of fragments full of imperfection, and betraying that imperfection in every touch, indulgently raise up a stately and unaccusable whole” (472). But neither Renaissance patrons nor modern English consumers can accept this scheme, says Ruskin, and they can’t appreciate the fact that “the best things shall be seldomest seen in their best form” or that “the finer the nature, the more flaws it will show through the clearness of it” (472).
As always in Ruskin, there’s a stark moral decision to make regarding the status of labor, that activity so central to human life and value: “you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both” (473). There is no happy medium, no easy accommodation to make, when it comes to honoring the spiritual well-being of laborers or getting the most materially “perfect” work from them. What is imperfect, flawed, incomplete, is exactly what links the thing made to infinity.
In both Romantic poetics and Christian theology, the fragment is greater than the limited whole because it indicates striving, progress, aspiration to a higher and even infinite state of spirituality. But Ruskin’s Christian framework is hardly Byronic—it emphasizes not an autonomous attempt at self-transcendence but instead promotes a kind of aspiration that begins with the frank acknowledgement of the individual’s own limitations and imperfections. The body and its material works are finite; art and architecture are of value only insofar as they express the soul’s attempt to break free of materiality while still accepting that it cannot entirely do so.
When Ruskin mentions clouds in connection with labor, as he does when he writes of the worker’s efforts, “we know the height of it only, when we see the clouds settling upon him” (473), we should remember that in his analysis of Turner’s atmospheric paintings, clouds at once veil and bear the sun’s radiance. Clouds need to be read as semi-translucent markers of the boundary between the finite and infinity.
“[E]xamine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters . . . but do not mock at them, for they are signs of the life and liberty of every workman, who struck the stone . . .” (474). With respect to the present day, he says, “It is not that men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread” (474). The dignity of labor is as central to Ruskin as labor in general was to his predecessor Carlyle.
Like Carlyle, Ruskin is no great promoter of democratic change: in characterizing liberty, he makes much the same point that Carlyle did, only in a gentler fashion: one day, he says, “men will see that to obey another man, to labour for him, yield reverence to him or to his place, is not slavery. It is often the best kind of liberty” (474). Ruskin advocates a rank-based yet egalitarian society, one that (like the Christian Church) values the strivings and aspirations of each imperfect believer, one that acknowledges the gap between the human and the divine but treats it in a hopeful way.
“We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilized invention of the division of labor, only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided, but the men” (475). The division of labor, of course, is a central tenet of capitalist production, one enunciated by Adam Smith in his 1776 book, The Wealth of Nations.
Smith explains this principle in a positive manner that suggests how it has the potential to end millennia of human misery: humanity has never found it easy to keep body and soul together; the ancient problem was that of production: many people simply didn’t get enough to eat, or have enough possessions to make life more or less tolerable, never mind pleasant and full of opportunities for upward mobility. But the vast increases in production made possible by trade and increased volume of production made it possible to conceive of a time when poverty and want would be no more.
This hope for a better future is a vital point to understand about Adam Smith’s argument in favor of capitalism; he was not a soulless proponent of material accumulation but a moral philosopher who wanted the new mode and means of production to help people harness selfish individual desires for the good of the wider community. And when the market works, that is no doubt exactly what it does: the capitalist earns a good profit, and gives us things we need and want at a price we can live with.
But Ruskin is dealing with the phenomenon that Marx calls “alienated labor”: under nineteenth-century production methods, many workers found little meaning in their work but instead experienced it as essentially dehumanizing and isolating. They were producing a world of riches in which they themselves had miserably little share, and which cost them any chance to become something more than they already were or to make meaningful connections with their fellow laborers.
Marx’s term “the fetishism of the commodity” is central to his analysis. He emphasizes that under capitalist production, it is things that matter and have vital relations, not the people who make them with their own minds and hands—the worker is reduced to a thing, while the thing is treated as if it were a living being), applies to virtually everything done in a consumer society.
Adam Smith himself points out that we might one day pay people to do specialized kinds of thinking for us, just as we would pay someone to repair our shoes or furniture. So in this way alienation and fragmentation is the law of life under capitalism. Ruskin opposes the entire system for that reason, though of course his solution is radically different from Marx’s, which puts its faith in the revolutionary potential of the industrial proletariat or working class.
“The old Venice glass was muddy, inaccurate in all its forms, and clumsily cut, if at all. And the old Venetian was justly proud of it” (477). What is Ruskin’s answer to the inherent problem of capitalist production? Well, he offers a moral prescription, a consumer’s list of things to consider before buying anything: imitation and exact finish are not to be sought for their own sake, while “invention” is to be rewarded at every turn, wherever possible. His main example is that of Venetian glass, which is of course both strikingly beautiful, all the more so because of its imperfections. Mass-manufactured glass can’t compete with it for quality or beauty.
One must accept the simultaneous existence of both poorly executed and well executed Venetian glass; if we want the best of it, we have to accept that quality will vary from one piece to the next. We could name a variety of similar products—indeed, the whole “Crafts” movement in England and America is premised on this model of the moral consumer who has the welfare of the worker in view: things made by hand and produced with care are favored, while merely utilitarian items are generally discouraged because they not only dishonor laborers but also lead to a world that is ugly and unpleasant to live in.
Today’s advocates of buying organic produce make a similar argument: fair trade organic coffees, locally grown organic produce, and other such goods are becoming more popular, at least for those who can afford them.
There’s reason to be sympathetic towards Ruskin’s insistence that buying something can be a moral or an immoral act. Proponents of the market philosophy are always insisting that capitalist economics is the appropriate system for lovers of liberty and individual autonomy, yet at times one hears them insisting also that the model of the rational consumer is absolute: people will always follow the law of competition, buying what they need and want on the basis of a certain cost/quality ratio: i.e. they will do what nets them the most good stuff at the lowest possible price.
But that is a kind of determinism: what if I want to buy a zero-emissions car even though it costs more, because I think it’s simply the right thing to do and I have sufficient funds to do so? Am I an automaton who can’t make such choices, or am I a free agent who might just make a financial sacrifice to derive both tangible and intangible benefits from my ethical purchase? Or what if I choose not to buy products tested on animals even if they cost more or it takes a bit of effort to find out which products are “cruelty free”? And so forth.
It is usually possible to make such choices. Ruskin’s idea is not so impractical that we should discount it as absurd. But at the same time, it’s hard to see how to get an entire society to make such choices so regularly as to influence sufficiently what gets produced. Most people don’t have enough money to buy organic avocados or an electric car that costs an extra 5,000 dollars. Perhaps the best solution is some combination of governmental incentive and market initiative: on their own, huge companies that benefit from the status quo aren’t likely to make changes in production that threaten to undercut their profits.
Ruskin says that there are two reasons why the demand for perfection in art is wrong. The first is “that no great man ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure,” and the second is that “imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change” (479).
Ruskin’s emblem for the latter point is the foxglove blossom (digitalis purpurea, a beautiful flowering plant used today in the making of an important heart drug). This blossom, writes Ruskin, is “a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom” and is, therefore, “a type of the life of this world” (479). We are always passing from one state to another. The law of fallen life is change, imperfection, striving. Christian teleology implies a purposeful movement from decay (the fallen past) to a redemptive future (the foxglove’s “bud”).
By contemplating the foxglove “passage” in the book of nature, writes Ruskin, we should know that “All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy” (479).
Additional Essay on The Stones of Venice (1851-53, Cook & Wedderburn edition)
In The Stones of Venice (1851-53), Ruskin makes an historical parallel between the British and Venetian Empires: as the Italian city-state fell, so will England, if it does not heed the warning set before it. Ruskin goes on to set forth the conditions for what he sees as the biblically proportioned fall of the great city. In this narrative, the Italian Renaissance plays the role of Satan to an earlier, organically and spiritually sound period of feudal society and Gothic architecture.
Ruskin’s spiritualized view of architecture demands that we consider Gothic religious structures with regard to their common function: that of serving as material gathering places for the faithful. A church is a place for spiritual communion and propitiation of an offended god, and the labor that brings it into being must comply with these purposes. In Ruskin’s Christian and romanticist tradition, building a church is an expressive act. The humility that characterizes the medieval workman’s and foreman’s manner of expression, Ruskin, always the amateur naturalist, illustrates by way of the foxglove blossom, digitalis purpurea. This plant is always in transition, and therein lies its emblematic value:
Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom,—a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom,—is a type of the life of this world. 1
In contrast to Gothic architecture’s recognition of the Fall and the divine plan for redemption, Ruskin sets the devilish pride of the Continental Renaissance and the dead perfection of modern industrial Europe. Gothic building, based upon the system of “Constitutional Ornament,” liberated the workman’s powers. In this system, says Ruskin, “the executive inferior power is, to a certain point, emancipated and independent, having a will of its own, yet confessing its inferiority and rendering obedience to higher powers” (Stones, Works 10, 188).
Modern scientific building, however (the accomplice of liberal capitalism), devotes itself to stamping out any last spark of Gothic spirituality and individualism. Both the Renaissance and the modern era, explains Ruskin, are to be condemned for their adherence to the system of “Revolutionary ornament, in which no executive inferiority is admitted at all” (Stones, Works 10, 189). The Renaissance provides the paradigm for the modern fall, but we must examine the latter first because Ruskin himself ultimately leaves it behind, choosing instead to locate the solution to England’s problems largely in the feudal past.
We might, of course, go directly to the later works on political economy for a full discussion concerning the problems of modern economics and industrialism. Yet, Ruskin states his basic moral position on these matters so forcefully in The Stones of Venice that there is no need to abandon that work. When Ruskin characterizes the Renaissance method of ornament in architecture as “Revolutionary,” he means to castigate a chaotic, prideful system of production. He denounces modern architecture and the relation it enjoins between worker and employer.
Nineteenth-century building, he believes, mimics an already deceitful, corrupt Renaissance imitation of classical integrity. The modern architect is even more apt to make a slave of his workmen than were the overseers of Assyria or the Greeks, the latter of which “gave to the lower workman no subject which he could not perfectly execute” (Stones, Works 10, 189). The source of the modern system’s intense brutality, again, lies in the nineteenth century’s base, auto-referential, anti-expressive pursuit of machine perfection. Ruskin’s is perhaps the grandest of Victorian broadsides aimed at the Industrial Era’s notion of progress.
The Christian-tinged romanticism of Ruskin’s work as a whole shows in his constant emphasis upon the dignity of imperfection. The body and its works are finite, but the spirit is not. Architecture, though it may appear to the undiscerning eye to be a finished thing, is valuable to Ruskin only in so far as it expresses the soul’s poignant striving to break free of the material limitations that hem it in. The perfection that is achieved by the conjoining of human labor and machine indicates no more than spiritual complacency. The fragmentary or imperfect production is greater than the whole, for it indicates the progress of spirit, not matter.
Ruskin’s vision is Romantic, expressive, though the desire for self-transcendence is here tempered by Christian humility. As in art the favored Turner’s clouds at once veil and reveal the sun’s divine radiance, so in manufacture the glass of Venice, “muddy, inaccurate in all its forms, and clumsily cut” (Stones, Works 10, 199), reveals the more strikingly the inventive, expressive power of the one who shaped it. But the well-turned steel and wood of the modern house or church, according to Ruskin, expresses only the vicious class divisions that make its production possible.
The choice Ruskin forces upon those whom Carlyle called England’s Captains of Industry is a harsh one. The working-class artisan cannot be two things at once: “You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both” (Stones, Works 10, 192). The target of such criticisms, evidently, is political economy’s most winning argument—division of labor. For this diabolically correct theory, Ruskin reserves his deepest eloquence and contempt:
We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilised invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men:—Divided into mere segments of men—broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin, or the head of a nail. (Stones, Works 10, 196).
There is no need to dishonor Ruskin’s moralizing to see its limitations. Perhaps no author, short of Carlyle and the sublimely sarcastic Marx, has written so finely about the inhumanity of capitalist production. The image Ruskin creates of the modern answer to the Venetian glass-worker, with his “hands vibrating with a perpetual and exquisitely timed palsy, and the beads [of glass] dropping beneath their vibration like hail,” is unforgettable (Stones, Works 10, 197). 2 Still, his attempt to trace in stone the faults of empire and industry amount to a call for reversion to nearly feudal social and economic relations.
The partial nature of Ruskin’s ideas about improving Britain may be gauged from the caustic reaction of more thoroughgoing radicals, chiefly Marx. Though Ruskin shares with Marx (and Hegel) the belief that labor is an essential source of human value and dignity, the revolutionary scorns English cultural criticism’s brand of reform along with the anti-industrialist efforts of fellow Continentals. Here is the way Marx analyses the historical causality of “socialist” yearnings in the tradition of which the middle-class, wealthy Ruskin belongs. The text is The Communist Manifesto, 1848, published just half a decade or so before The Stones of Venice:
Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the aristocracies of France and England to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society. In the French revolution of July 1830, and in the English reform agitation, these aristocracies again succumbed to the hateful upstart. Thenceforth, a serious political struggle was altogether out of the question. A literary battle alone remained possible. . . .
In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy was obliged to lose sight, apparently, of its own interests, and to formulate its indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus the aristocracy took its revenge by singing lampoons against its new master, and whispering in his ears sinister prophecies of coming catastrophe.
In this way arose Feudal Socialism: Half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty, and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart’s core, but always ludicrous in its effect through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history. 3
In Ruskin’s case, the way to ahistoricism lies in his rhetorically effective displacement of modern English sins onto corrupt Italian practices. We may see the guilty narrative in Ruskin’s sections of The Stones of Venice, “The Ducal Palace” (Vol. 2, Ch. 8) and “Grotesque Renaissance” (Vol. 3, Ch. 3). Having explained earlier that “the two principal causes of natural decline in any school are over-luxuriance and over-refinement” (Stones, Works 11, 6), Ruskin goes on to trace with perhaps too much precision the date of the first corrupting influences upon Venice’s Gothic style.
The trained eye, he writes, need only look for the date on “the steps of the choir of the Church of St. John and Paul.” On the left the viewer will see the tomb of Doge Marco Cornaro, dated 1367, while on the right will appear the sepulchre of Doge Michele Morosini, dated 1382. By the latter year, the corruption has become unmistakable: Morosini’s tomb is “voluptuous, and over-wrought” (Stones, Works 11, 13-14). What is the cause of such decadence, and what lesson will Ruskin draw for England from the fall of Venice?
To answer these questions, we must examine Ruskin’s commentary in “Grotesque Renaissance” on the role of play and jesting in architecture and, more generally, in the life of a people. The central element in the Gothic that flowered in medieval Venice and even more abundantly elsewhere in Italy, says Ruskin, is a noble form of the grotesque. “The true grotesque,” he explains, is “the expression of the repose or play of a serious mind,” and the false consists in “the full exertion of a frivolous one” (Stones, Works 11, 170).
The true grotesque commands our attention in the best of Gothic architecture—its energetically redundant foliage, its gargoyles and other ornamentation full of appreciation of the two passions Ruskin says govern humanity: “love of God, and the fear of sin, and of its companion—Death” (Stones, Works 11, 163). The false type is the effect in art of the fourth era of the Renaissance, and confronts us with nothing but the “sneering mockery” that comes from “delight in the contemplation of bestial vice” (Stones, Works 11, 145).
This latter form of the grotesque, argues Ruskin, glowers at spectators from the sole Renaissance landmark reminding them of the once populous Piazza of Santa Maria Formosa, site of the medieval Feast of the Maries. This landmark, consisting of “A head,—huge, inhuman, and monstrous,—leering in bestial degradation, too foul to be either pictured or described,” typifies the “evil spirit to which Venice was abandoned in the fourth period of her decline” (Stones, Works 11, 145). There are those who play wisely, necessarily, inordinately, and not at all, according to Ruskin, and the foul landmark was surely made by workmen who labored during the reign of the third in this company.
The healthier grotesque ornamentation of the Gothic period was made by workers who, lacking the refinement and leisure to repose wisely, yet played in a sufficiently healthy manner to return to their architectural labor. Even while they toiled, these “inferior workmen” were allowed to some extent to employ their creative energies and fancy, stamping thereby their “character” and “satire” upon the work they did (Stones, Works 11, 157).
The later, unhealthy form of grotesque ornament comes of labor designed to express mechanically nothing but the self-indulgence and pleasure-seeking of the great citizens who commissioned the building. This labor is done at the behest of those who are idle, who neither think nor work but who, thanks to circumstances, are able “to make amusement the object of their existence” (Stones, Works 11, 154). A special subcategory of such types in Ruskin’s almost Dantean scheme consists in those who treat sacred and vital things irreverently.
These latter categories—idleness and irreverence—Ruskin takes as typical faults of Venice in its final Renaissance decline. Base workers can make nothing but base things, expressing by them the baseness of those who have set them on. It was a long, painful process, this decline of Venice into labyrinthine sensualism. Ruskin traces the beginning of the end not only to the tomb of Doge Michele Morosini, 1382, but, as he reminds us at the end of “Grotesque Renaissance,” in more fully historical terms to the passing of Doge Tomaso Mocenigo in 1423. This is made plain in the first volume of Stones:
I date the commencement of the Fall of Venice from the death of Carlo Zeno, 8th May 1418; the visible commencement from that of another of her noblest and wisest children, the Doge Tomaso Mocenigo, who expired five years later. The reign of Foscari followed, gloomy with pestilence and war; a war in which large acquisitions of territory were made by subtle or fortunate policy in Lombardy, and disgrace, significant as irreparable, sustained in the battles on the Po at Cremona, and in the marshes of Caravaggio (Stones, Works 9, 21).
Venice’s fall, beginning with the death of the noble Mocenigo and the rise of Francesco Foscari, Ruskin traces in the changes to the Ducal Palace adjoining St. Mark’s. The city’s general intention to remodel its Gothic architectural treasure survived Mocenigo, but for once the patriot was wrong. Ruskin laments of the Doge that “in his zeal for the honour of future Venice, he had forgotten what was due to the Venice of long ago” (Stones, Works 10, 352). With great precision, Ruskin describes the first sign of moral and architectural decay:
I said that the new Council Chamber, at the time when Mocenigo brought forward his measure, had never yet been used. It was in the year 1422 that the decree passed to rebuild the palace: Mocenigo died in the following year, and Francesco Foscari was elected in his room. The Great Council Chamber was used for the first time on the day when Foscari entered the Senate as Doge,—the 3rd of April, 1423, according to the Caroldo Chronicle; the 23rd, which is probably correct, by an anonymous MS., No. 60, in the Correr Museum;—and, the following year, on the 27th of March, the first hammer was lifted up against the old palace of Ziani.
That hammer stroke was the first act of the period properly called the “Renaissance.” It was the knell of the architecture of Venice,—and of Venice herself (Stones, Works 10, 351-52).
The moral for England appears strongly in the peroration to “Grotesque Renaissance.” When Mocenigo died in 1423 and Foscari took his place as ruler, Ruskin points out, “Sifesteggio dalla citta uno anno intero,” or “the city kept festival for a whole year” (Stones, Works 11, 195). From thence, the way to moral perdition and defeat at the hands of the Turks was straight:
Venice had in her childhood sown, in tears, the harvest she was to reap in rejoicing. She now sowed in laughter the seeds of death.
Thenceforward, year after year, the nation drank with deeper thirst from the fountains of forbidden pleasure, and dug for springs, hitherto unknown, in the dark places of the earth. In the ingenuity of indulgence, in the varieties of vanity, Venice surpassed the cities of Christendom, as of old she had surpassed them in fortitude and devotion; and as once the powers of Europe stood before her judgment-seat, to receive the decisions of her justice, so now the youth of Europe assembled in the halls of her luxury, to learn from her the arts of delight (Stones, Works 11, 195).
The author’s adherence to Christian teleology shines through this and every other page of The Stones of Venice, and in this early masterwork, Ruskin seems still to have kept firmly to the evangelical faith of his parents. Even when he lost that faith and turned from criticism of art to chastisement of politicians and factory owners, the same Christian framework governs his writing. The moral earnestness that informs Ruskin’s ability to hear in a Renaissance laborer’s hammer the knell of Venetian piety, we shall find informing as well the schemes Ruskin later proposes to solve modern England’s social problems.
The prophet’s indignation and the art critic’s lament modulate into the feudalist’s call for a stratified society based upon recognition of the dignity of labor. In Unto This Last (1860), Ruskin proposes to set England back on the right road by dividing its classes into the medieval functions of Soldier, Pastor, Physician, Lawyer, and Merchant, for which latter officer the workmen will employ their skills and imagination. In essence, Ruskin’s scheme for reform is every bit as hierarchical as that of Carlyle, except that the latter does not propose to do away with the Industrial Revolution altogether.
Ruskin’s entire narrative about the Good Gothic and the Bad Renaissance exempts the author and his readers from confronting what Marx would call the entirely new status and potential of the industrial proletariat. This new class faces the bourgeoisie with the fundamental contradictions of its own system of production and social organization, but Ruskin would put away the workmen’s anger with patriarchal supervision. In Ruskin, then, what seems to be material history is fancy made visible and audible by the great writer’s skill. The hammer blows against the Ducal Palace, the hideousness of the late-Renaissance gargoyle, and the image of the year-long celebration of Foscari’s ascension to power articulate a moral abstraction.
Ruskin’s twin battery of aesthetics and paternal socialism, further analysis would only underscore, are designed to invest perception and work, respectively, with purposive order in the face of social and moral chaos. Ruskin displaces the reification, mechanization, and desacramentalization going on with Tayloresque efficiency in Britain to Renaissance Italy and its increasingly corrupt artists, the fall of which then becomes a cautionary tale for the present. The specific program for reform that follows The Stones of Venice in Unto This Last and other such works, displacing present woes to an immoral past, sets forth as savior the anachronistic vision of a happily stratified England.
1. John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, The Works of John Ruskin, vol. 10, eds. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (1851-53; London: George Allen, 1904), 203-04.
2. Ruskin, Stones, Works Volume 10, 197.
3. Karl Marx and Frederick (Friedrich) Engels, The Communist Manifesto, English translation (1848; 1949; reprint, New York: International Publishers, 1983), 32.
Edition: Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 11th edition. Volume E, The Victorian Age. New York: 2024. ISBN-13: 978-0393543322.
Copyright © 2026 Alfred J. Drake
Document Timestamp: 3/11/2026