Building Ruskin's Italy: Watching Architecture

摘要

In June, 1852, the writer, historian, social commentator and artist John Ruskin sent a letter to his father claiming, There is a strong instinct in me, which I cannot analyse, to draw and describe the things I love... not for my own advantage, but a sort of instinct, like that for eating and drinking'. Ruskin's instincts, evinced in a prolific and long career of impassioned books, drawings and art collecting, demands perennial and innovative academic attention. In both his texts and works of art, there is a sense of poetic flight rapidly moving from one cluster of ideas to the next, combining searing inci-siveness with generalist flourish. On the rare occasions that Ruskin exhibited his drawings, critics were inclined towards a negative view of Ruskin's failure to complete his paintings and drawings with a polished finitude. The painter Hubert von Herko-mer noted that Ruskin 'never finishes his work to the edges'. It is, as Stephen Wildman points out, precisely that seemingly lacking trait that compels much sustained investigation into Ruskin's drawing practices: his combination of 'fiercely precise detail' with 'an impatient, spontaneous rendering of space and atmosphere' bestows an intensive and persistent vibrancy upon many of his watercolours and drawings. Beauvais, Lucca, Chamonix, Oxford and, most of all, Venice are all subject to his bright eye and quick pencil. The negotiations between observation, memory, medium and historicity permeate Ruskin's writing and visual art alike to expose bold and compulsively repeated attempts to unite looking, making, feeling and interpreting in complex interconnected gestures across decades of frenetic productivity.