According to Ruskin, the example o f Italian greatness had to reawaken the consciousness o f contemporary England, which he saw characterised by insensitivity, vulgarity, and by a degradation o f humanity due to industrial and commercial developments. In his chapter on ‘The Nature o f Gothic’ he points out that ‘all Europe at this day’^* had to regain that ‘freedom o f thought, and rank in scale o f being, such as no laws, no charters can secure’.^ Gothic art and the context in which it developed were characterised by a freedom, which was lost because o f the
...degradation o f the operative into a machine, which, more than any other evil o f the times, is leading the mass o f the nation everywhere into vain, incoherent, destructive struggling for a freedom o f which they can not explain the nature to themselves. ^
He emphasises the feeling o f alienation from his own work and from society man was experiencing; he wrote;
It is not that men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and therefore look to wealth as the only means o f pleasure. It is not that men are pained by the scorn o f the upper classes, but they cannot endure their own; for they feel that the kind o f
ibid., voI.II, p. 161 ^ ibid.
labour to which they are condemned is verily a degrading one, and make them less than m en/
The theme o f the negative nature o f the growing industrial and mechanical development has old roots; it can already be found in Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lvrical Ballads, and will be found in many o f the authors I am going to deal with until D.H. Lawrence. The proposed solution to this problem varied; but we can generally say that in all cases it included the desire, the attempt to escape to an uncontaminated place. The commonest poles o f the dichotomy are usually the North as opposed to the South, or the past contrasted with the present. In Ruskin’s case the ‘other’ place opposed to the vulgarity o f his age is, as we have read in the first sentence o f The Stones o f Venice.Venice. Later in the chapter he explains why he chose this city. He points out that when the Roman Empire was declining, when its religion
...was laid asleep in a glittering sepulchre, the living light rose upon both horizons, and the fierce swords o f the Lombard and Ai*ab were shaken over its golden paralysis. ^
The role o f the Lombards and o f the Arabs was respectively ‘to give hardihood and system to the enervated body and enfeebled mind o f Christendom’,^ and ‘ to punish idolatry, and to proclaim the spirituality o f worship’.*® After explaining this, Ruskin notes that
Opposite in their character and mission, alike in their magnificence of energy, they came from the North and from the South, the glacier torrent and the lava stream; they met and contended over the wreck o f the Roman Empire; and the veiy centre o f the struggle, the point o f pause o f both, the dead water o f the opposite eddies, charged with emboyed fragments o f the Roman wreck, is VENICE. * *
Ruskin was nevertheless aware o f the decline Venice had experienced and was still undergoing; in the opening sentence o f The Stones o f Venice he links the image o f the city with that o f the ruins. He then provides the reader with this image o f Venice in the period o f her decline, a decline which continues up to the present days;
...a ghost upon the sands o f the sea, so weak, so quiet; so bereft o f all but her loveliness, that we might well doubt as we watched her in faint reflection in the mirage o f the lagoon, which was the City, and which the Shadow.*^
His aim was to record as much as possible o f the beauty o f the city before everything would have been destroyed, ‘to trace the lines o f this image before it be for ever lost’.*^
ibid. ,vol.I, p. 16 ^ ibid. ibid. ibid.,p.l7 *^ibid.,p. I ibid.,pp. 1-2
He disapproved o f the fact that industrial development was also reaching Venice, and of the horrible conditions o f the Venetian buildings. This too was a common aspect in the Victorian view o f Italy; those who saw in Italy the solution to the decay o f their contemporary England had to become more and more aware o f the failure o f their hopes.
In The Stones o f Venice Ruskin identified the beginning o f the decline o f Venice in the year 1418. One cannot fail to notice that he placed the beginning o f the city’s decay in the period between the end o f the Middle Ages and the beginning o f the Renaissance. Actually, his view o f the Renaissance was negative, and completely different from that of Symonds and Pater. While Pater and Symonds considered it as the age o f the rebirth, as 1 will point out later in this section, Ruskin considered the Middle Ages as a period of spiritual greatness in every aspect o f social and cultural life, and the Renaissance as characterised by slavery. Throughout the Victorian period it will be more common to read studies and novels concerned with the Renaissance period and contrasting Ruskin’s view, It will be interesting to point out how George Eliot’s picture o f 15®' century Romola can be considered Ruskinian to a certain extent, but how, on the other hand, it is linked with the later Victorian developments o f a different concept o f the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Ruskin saw in the passage from a religious culture to one considering the human element as the centre o f the universe the reason for the moral decline characterising the historical development from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. He describes
Renaissance art as ‘rationalistic’,*'* as ‘pestilent’,*^ and believes it was characterised by ‘a return to pagan systems’.**^ Venice took part in this decline; he points out that
...as she was once the most religious, was in her fall the most corrupt o f European states; and as she was in her strength the centre o f the pure currents o f Christian architecture, so she is in her decline the source o f the Renaissance. *^
In the ‘Nature o f Gothic’ Ruskin underlines the main elements which made Gothic art so great; they were savageness, changefulness, naturalism, grotesqueness, rigidity and redundance. These elements were all destroyed by Renaissance art, which was rather characterised by a search for perfection, and by an absence o f variety. Ruskin points out that
...neither architecture nor any other noble work o f man can be good unless it be imperfect; and let us be prepared for the otherwise strange fact, which w e shall discern clearly as we approach the period o f the Renaissance, that the first cause o f the arts o f Europe was a relentless requirement o f
ibid., p.23 ibid.,p.25 ibid.,p.23 ibid., p.24
perfection incapable alike either o f being silenced by veneration for greatness, or softened into forgiveness o f simplicity.
The two main causes o f natural decline in Renaissance art were ‘over-luxuriance’*® and ‘over-refinement’; ‘luxuriance o f ornament, refinement o f execution, and idle subtleties of fancy’ took the place o f ‘ tme thought and firm handling’.R e n a issa n c e art looked for perfection o f execution and fullness o f knowledge at the expense o f invention, of savageness, rudeness, which, as we have seen, were considered by Ruskin the main qualities o f Gothic art. In the chapter ‘Roman Renaissance’ he points out as a major feature o f the Renaissance school the
...introduction o f accurate knowledge into all its work, so far as it possesses such knowledge; and its evident conviction that such science is necessary to the excellence o f the work, and is the first thing to be expressed therein’.
The great mistake o f the Renaissance was to believe that art and science were the same thing, whereas, according to Ruskin, science aims at knowing and art at changing,
'"ibid., vol. II, p. 169 ibid.,vol.III,p.3 ibid.
ibid. 22ibid.
producing, creating; that science ‘deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves while art ’exclusively with things as they affect the human sense and human soul’;^^ in this respect it is concerned with ‘ a field o f question just as much vaster than that o f science, as the soul is larger than the material creation’.T h e r e fo r e , the role o f the artist is to see and to feel, he must possess the perceptive, sensitive, retentive faculties. The evil o f the Renaissance system is the fact that ‘...knowledge is thought the one and only good, and it is never inquired whether men are vivified by it or p a r a l y s e d T h e Renaissance man ‘under the weight o f his knowledge’^^ cannot ‘move so lightly as in the days o f his simplicityFurthermore, the Renaissance was considered by Ruskin as the constant expression o f ‘individual vanity and pride’. T h i s led to ‘coldness, perfectness o f training, incapability o f emotion, want o f sympathy with the weakness o f lower men, blank, hopeless, haughty self-sufficiency.’
Another characteristic o f the Renaissance was, according to him, infidelity. He points out that whereas Gothic art was ‘good for God’s worship’,R e n a issa n c e art was ‘good for man’s w o r s h i p H e underlines the involvement o f the Church in the world, and its consequent corruption; he points out the spread o f pagan ideas due to the
ibid., p. 36 "'ibid. ibid. ibid.,vol.III,p.51 ibid.,p.52 ^ibid ibid.,p.59 ibid ibid.,p.60 ibid.
enthusiasm for classical literature, and to the ‘misdirection o f the powers o f ait’.^'^ He writes:
In old times, men used their powers o f painting to show the objects o f faith; in later times, they used the objects o f faith that they may show their powers o f painting.
This naturally led to a lack o f concern for the subject; men reached a point when
...sacred, profane, or sensual objects were employed, with absolute indifference, for the display o f colour and execution; and gradually the mind o f Europe congealed into that state o f utter apathy, - inconceivable, unless it had been witnessed, and unpardonable, unless by us, who have been infected by it, - which permits us to place the Madonna and the Aphrodite side by side in our galleries, and to pass with the same unmoved inquiry into the manner o f their handling, from a Bacchanal to a Nativity.
All this took place
ibid.,p.l06 ibid., p. 107 36 ibid.
...upon minds enei*vated by luxury, and which were tempted, at the veiy same period, to forgetfulness or denial o f all religious principle by their own basest instincts. The faith which had been undermined by the genius o f Pagans, was overthrown by the crimes o f Christians; and the ruin which was begun by scholarship, was completed by sensuality. The characters o f the heathen divinities were as suitable to the manners o f the time as their forms were agreeable to its taste; and Paganism again became, in effect, the religion o f Europe.
As I will point out in the next chapter, George Eliot’s view o f Renaissance Italy as it