Ideas of Truth, Beauty, and Relation

The unique characteristics of Ruskin's thoughts on art include, among others, devotion to Wordsworth, praise of Turner, defence of pre- Raphaelitism, and admiration of Gothic architecture.

Turner - glorious in conception - unfathomable in knowledge - solitary in power - with the elements waiting upon his will, and the night and the morning obedient to his call, sent as a prophet of God to reveal to men the mysteries of His universe, standing, like the great angel of the Apocalypse, clothed with a cloud, and with a rainbow upon his head, and with the sun and stars given into his hand. (vol. 3, 254)

At the outset of the first volume, he raises a serious question about what is greatness in art, and replies without hesitation:

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.... I say that the art is greatest which conveys to the mind of the spectator, by any means whatsoever, the greatest number of the greatest ideas. (vol. 3, 88, and 92)

Ruskin calls the mental and psychic faculty of artists that produces the great works of art ‘excellent', whilst the terms ‘beautiful', ‘useful', or ‘good' are applied to the great works as such.

He defines the subject matter of Modern Painters as the investigation of three grand ideas: truth, beauty, and relation. They represent the methods, criteria, and aims of great art respectively. The essentials of each idea may be summarized as follows:

1.3.1 IdeasofTruth

The first volume of Modern Painters discusses ideas of truth by dealing with Turner.

Ruskin’s praise of Turner is based on an appraisal of his excellence in presenting the truth of nature. The inspiration or revelation he got from Turner’s work is that it is the task of art to discover the divine attributes hidden in nature through a display of the whole human nature. His view that art is a tool that represents and contributes to life follows Wordsworth’s theory of poetry. Ruskin analyses Turner’s landscape in terms of techniques of ‘tone, colour, chiaroscuro, and space’, on the one hand, and in terms of objects of ‘sky, earth, water, and vegetation’, on the other. He concludes that Turner is the only painter who has ever drawn the changing skies with various forms of clouds; that he is the only painter who has ever drawn a mountain or a stone on the earth; that he is the only painter who has ever drawn the stem of a tree; that he is the only painter who has ever represented the surface of calm, or the force of agitated, water; and that he is the only painter who has represented the effects of space on distant objects or who has rendered the abstract beauty of natural colour (vol. 3, 252).

Turner restrained the use of various colours and made the contrast between light and shade predominant over colour, keeping tones of blue, brown, and grey. It is due to this treatment of light that Turner is often regarded as the pioneer of the Impressionists. According to Ruskin, the highest attainment of Turner’s technique is ‘light without colour’ (vol. 3, 234). Abstraction of light from colour is based on the painter’s power of imagination aimed at ‘expression of ideas’.

In a pamphlet entitled Pre-Raphaelitism (1851), Ruskin defended, along with Turner, the movement of the young painters who were then called the Pre-Raphaelites. They rebelled against the art education of classicism in the Royal Academy of Arts and urged a return to the Medieval Italian painters before Raphael who was a representative of Renaissance art. The pamphlet of the defence, though titled Pre-Raphaelitism, is largely devoted to the admiration of Turner and the disparagement of Raphael. In ‘Pre- Raphaelitism’ (1853b), one of his public lectures in Edinburgh, he says: ‘Pre-Raphaelitism has but one principle, that of absolute, uncompromising truth in all that it does, obtained by working everything, down to the most minute detail, from nature, and from nature only’ (vol. 12, 157). Turner is ‘the first and greatest of the Pre-Raphaelites’. Pre-Raphaelitism is nothing but Turnerism.

1.3.2 IdeasofBeauty

In the second volume of Modern Painters Ruskin turned to the second subject of art, in other words ideas of beauty. Already in the first volume he made explicit an aspect of his fundamental position of art, that is, beauty as morality:

Any material object which can give us pleasure in the simple contemplation of its outward qualities without any direct and definite exertion of the intellect, I call in some way, or in some degree, beautiful.... Perfect taste is the faculty of receiving the greatest possible pleasure from those material sources which are attractive to our moral nature in its purity and perfection.... Ideas of beauty, then, be it remembered, are the subjects of moral, but not of intellectual perception. By the investigation of them we shall be led to the knowledge of ideal subject of art. (vol. 3, 109-11)

He asks about the relation between beauty and pleasure, that is, whether the end of art is practical for life or spiritual as it is related to the end of life itself. He distinguishes between ‘practical’ and ‘theoretic’ art in accordance with Aristotle’s distinction between praxis and theoria.

I wholly deny that the impressions of beauty are in any way sensual; they are neither sensual nor intellectual, but moral: and for the faculty receiving them, whose difference from mere perception I shall immediately endeavour to ex­plain, no term can be more accurate or convenient than that employed by the Greeks, ‘Theoretic’, which I pray permission, therefore, always to use, and to call the operation of the faculty itself, Theoria.... The mere animal consciousness of the pleasantness I call Aesthesis; but the exulting, reverent, and grateful percep­tion of it I call Theoria. For this, and this only, is the full comprehension and contemplation of the Beautiful as a gift of God. (vol. 4, 42, and 47)

We should remember that from ‘Theoria’ arise ‘Joy, Admiration, and Gratitude’, Ruskin’s key words for art and economics (vol. 4, 47). In using these words, he explains how the idea of beauty is essentially moral:

It is necessary to the existence of an idea of beauty, that the sensual pleasure which may be its basis should be accompanied first with joy, then with love of the object, then with the perception of kindness in a superior intelligence, finally, with thankfulness and veneration towards that intelligence itself; and no idea can be at all considered as in any way an idea of beauty, until it be made up of these emotions. (vol. 4, 48)

Ruskin uses the term ‘Theoria’ (or theoretic) in place of the term ‘aesthetic’, commonly employed in art theory, in order to challenge the traditional conception of beauty, which denies intellectual pleasure and is biased towards sensual pleasure. For him, the perfect conception of beauty is neither mere intellectual faculty nor mere sensual faculty but the faculty of Theoria that consists in moral will. The meaning of art as morality is that by the pursuit of true beauty one should raise human capacity and charac­ter so as to approach from an animal-like aesthetic towards divine Theoria.

Supposing the concept of beauty requires the perceptions of ‘Joy, Admiration, and Gratitude’, how are they produced? Ruskin distin­guishes between the two kinds of theoretic beauty which Theoria may yield, in other words Typical Beauty and Vital Beauty:

By the term Beauty, then, properly are signified two things. First, that external quality of bodies already so often spoken of, and which, whether it occur in a stone, flower, beast, or in man, is absolutely identical, which, as I have already asserted, may be shown to be in some sort typical of the Divine attributes, and which therefore I shall, for distinction’s sake, call Typical Beauty: and, secondarily, the appearance of felicitous fulfilment of function in living things, more especially of the joyful and right exertion of perfect life in man; and this kind of beauty I shall call Vital Beauty. (vol. 4, 64)

Typical Beauty is the divine attributes inherent in God’s creatures, while Vital Beauty is excellence of functions in living creatures. Typical Beauty represents the static and eternal order of an object, while Vital Beauty represents dynamic and disturbing innovation caused by imaginations of an artist. Typical Beauty indicates the objective criteria of great art, while Vital Beauty indicates its subjective criteria such as morality in the choice of subject, love of beauty, sincerity to truth, and imaginative creativity of an artist, all of which involve the whole powers of the human soul. Balancing the two kinds of beauty is the task of the Theoria of an artist.

Ruskin specifies six types of Typical Beauty: Infinity, Unity, Repose, Symmetry, Purity, and Moderation. Characteristic of his argument is that each type presupposes antinomy or paradox caused by the exist­ence of an opposite type of beauty which is mostly classified as Vital Beauty, such as the finite versus infinite, unity versus diversity, statics versus dynamics, symmetry versus irregularity, purity versus impurity, and restraint versus freedom.

1.3.3 IdeasofRelation

The third subject of Ruskin's project in Modern Painters, ideas of rela­tion, was not taken up until the fifth and last volume, published seven­teen years after the first one. Under this subject everything relating to the conception of art is arranged and all sources of pleasure are investigated as the synthesis of art theory by the ideas of relation or ‘association':

In this last division we have to consider the relations of art to God and man: its work in the help of human beings, and service of their Creator. We have to inquire into the various Powers, Conditions, and Aims of mind involved in the conception or creation of pictures; in the choice of subject, and the mode and order of its history. (vol. 7, 203)

Ruskin formulates the ideas of relation in a general form as the inter­dependence among parts or elements in the composition of the picture and extends it metaphorically from the picture to mineralogy and social rela­tions by the ‘law of help', as will be discussed in Subsection 1.5.2. The concept of ‘composition' will become the link between art and economy, both contributing to life. Ruskin's aesthetics has a far-reaching range of application. He provides the definition of the greatest art as producing ‘the greatest number of the greatest ideas' (vol. 3, 92), which proves the substi­tute for the utilitarian definition of ‘the greatest number of the greatest happiness'.

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