John Ruskin

Submitted by:- Nafe Singh 2K6/arch/616

John Ruskin was born on 8 February 1819, in London and educated at the University of Oxford. Ruskin became the first Slade Professor of Art at Oxford in 1869, remaining in the post until 1879. He gave the university a collection of prints, drawings, and photographs, and set up a drawing school for the students.

John Ruskin was an English author, poet and artist, although more famous for his work as art critic ,sage writer and social critic.

Life and thoughts:-

He was a staunch and vocal critic of the industrial revolution . He said that man had become a slave of the machines and that machine production had taken away the charm and uniqueness of various products as all of them were basically the same and did not have the love, attention and care associated with handcrafted products.

He said that each peace must be handcrafted. He

create a passion of use of natural colors and constructed buildings used polychromes (step towards modernism).He emphasized on exterior decoration with the use of stuccos and two dimensional decoration.

He hated the industrial revolution. He said that we can’t have dedication by machines which we got from a worker’s hand.

He had strong views on art and architecture. Ruskin considered some Renaissance masters, notably Titian and Dürer, to have shown similar devotion to nature, but he attacked even Michelangelo as a corrupting influence on art because of the lack of natural truth in his artistic works.

Ruskin had already met and befriended Turner, and eventually became one of the executors of his will. He did and proved what he said.

He was the chief advocator of gothic architecture.

Works

• His first work, serialized in Loudon's Architecture Magazine in 1836-37, under the pen name "Kata Phusin" (Greek for "according to Nature") was The Poetry of Architecture. This was a study of cottages, villas, and other dwellings which centered around a Words worthier argument that buildings should be sympathetic to local environments, and should use local materials.

• Ruskin's range was vast. He wrote over 250 works which started from art history, but expanded to cover topics ranging over science, geology, ornithology, literary criticism, the environmental effects of pollution, and mythology.

Art and design criticism

• Ruskin based his early work in defense of Turner on a belief that art communicated an understanding of nature, and that authentic artists should reject inherited conventions, and study and appreciate effects of form and color by direct observation. His most famous dictum was "go to nature in all singleness of heart, rejecting nothing and selecting nothing." He later believed that the Pre-Raphaelites formed "a new and noble school" of art that would provide a basis for a thoroughgoing reform of the art world. For Ruskin, art should communicate truth above all things. However, he believed this was not revealed by mere display of skill, but the expression of the artist's whole moral outlook. Ruskin rejected the work of Whistler because he considered it to epitomize a reductive mechanization of art.

• Ruskin's famous diatribe rejecting Classical tradition in The Stones of Venice—one of the nineteenth century's most influential books—embodies the inextricable mix of aesthetics and morality in his thought:"Pagan in its origin, proud and unholy in its revival, paralyzed in its old age... an architecture invented, as it seems, to make plagiarists of its architects, slaves of its workmen, and sybarites of its inhabitants; an architecture in which intellect is idle, invention impossible, but in which all luxury is gratified and all insolence fortified”.

• John Ruskin supplemented Pugin's ideas in his two hugely influential theoretical works, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1853). Finding his architectural ideal in Venice, Ruskin proposed that Gothic buildings excelled above all other architecture because of the "sacrifice" of the stone-carvers in intricately decorating every stone. Ruskin argued the case for Gothic government buildings as Pugin had done for churches, Followers of Ruskin and Pugin soon came into conflict with proponents of the classic revival, and the resulting conflict has often been called a battle of the two styles.

• The Oxford Museum of Natural History, a building designed with Ruskin's collaboration as an experiment in modern Gothic.

• Sage Hall at Cornell, an example of the "faux-Gothic" adaptation of Ruskinian principles of architecture.

The Oxford Museum

Sage Hall at Cornell

Rejection of mechanization and standardization also informed Ruskin's theories of architecture, and his emphasis on the importance of the Medieval Gothic style. He praised the Gothic style for what he saw as its reverence for nature and natural forms; the free, unfettered expression of artisans constructing and decorating buildings; and for the organic relationship he posited between worker and guild, worker and community, worker and natural environment, and between worker God. Nineteenth century attempts to reproduce Gothic form (pointed arches, etc.) was not enough to make these buildings expressions of what Ruskin (however erroneously) saw as true Gothic feeling, faith, and organics.

According to Ruskin ,characteristics of gothic architecture are:- 1. Savageness. 2. Changefulness. 3. Naturalism. 4. Grotesqueness.5. Rigidity.6. Redundancy

Gothic architecture has external forms, and internal elements. Its elements are certain mental tendencies of the builders, legibly expressed in it; as fancifulness, love of variety, love of richness, and such others. Its external forms are pointed arches, vaulted roofs, &c. And unless both the elements and the forms are there, we have no right to call the style Gothic.

• For Ruskin, the Gothic style embodied the same moral truths he sought in art. It expressed the meaning of architecture—as a combination of the values of strength, solidity and aspiration—all written, as it were, in stone. For Ruskin, creating true Gothic architecture involved the whole community, and expressed the full range of human emotions, from the sublime effects of soaring spires to the comically ridiculous carved grotesques and gargoyles. Even its crude and "savage" aspects were proof of "the liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure." Classical architecture, in contrast, expressed a morally vacuous repressive standardization.

Ruskin associated Classical values with modern developments, in particular with demoralizing consequences of the industrial revolution, resulting in buildings such as The Crystal Palace, which he despised as an oversized greenhouse. Although Ruskin wrote about architecture in many works over the course of his career, his much-anthologized essay "The Nature of Gothic" from the second volume of The Stones of Venice (1853) is widely considered to be one of his most important and evocative discussions of his central argument.

Ruskin’s drawings and descriptionsRuskin’s drawings and descriptions of the disintegrating architecture of Italy divulge a pleasure in the study of the surfaces ;immerses himself in the weathering surface of gothic architecture and loss himself in the study of its minutes details. Architectural surface are studied as if they have a depth ,a depth however that has nothing to do with the structure of their actual insides but an ‘elusive depth ‘. Searching for its inner character .

Study of tracery

Window detail

Shapes of column Detailing in column

Ruskin reads the building as a face ,watching the cuts and gaps on the body’s surface where the differentiation between the inside and outside of the body are made complicated ;he says "I do with a building as I do with a man ,watch the eye and the lips ;when they are bright and eloquent, the form of the body is a little consequence” Arch from façade of a church

• Historic preservation

Ruskin's belief in preservation of ancient buildings had a significant influence on later thinking about the distinction between conservation and restoration of old buildings. Ruskin was a strong proponent of the former, while his contemporary, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, advocated for the latter. In The Seven Lamps of Architecture, Ruskin writes:-

“Neither by the public, nor by those who have the care of public monuments, is the true meaning of the word restoration understood. It means the most total destruction which a building can suffer: a destruction out of which no remnants can be gathered: a destruction accompanied with false description of the thing destroyed. Do not let us deceive ourselves in this important matter; it is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture.”

This abhorrence for restoration is in marked contrast to Viollet-le-Duc, who wrote that restoration is a "means to reestablish [a building] to a finished state, which may in fact never have actually existed at any given time.”

Ruskin had a deep respect for Gothic architecture and old buildings in general. To him, the building's age was the most important aspect of its preservation: "For, indeed, the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, not in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or criticism, which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity.”

Conclusion• He was a famous art critic and philosopher. He gave a new

definition to the gothic architecture. He was against the industrial revolution. His made drawings have extensive detailing. Ruskin had a deep respect for Gothic architecture and old buildings in general. He wrote two nineteenth century's most influential books, The Stones of Venice and The Seven Lamps of Architecture. He did and prove everything which he said.

References:-

• Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.• Google search.• Seniors.• The Stones of Venice: Vol. II ( eBook).• The Seven Lamps of Architecture ( eBook).• John Ruskin:-The Nature of Gothic.