John Ruskin

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Nafe
Singh
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,
 Life and thoughts:-

Ø 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.

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

Ø Ruskin had already met and befriended

Turner, and eventually became one of the
executors of his will. He did and proved what
he said.

Ø He was the chief advocator of gothic

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

• Sage Hall at Cornell, an

example of the "faux-
Gothic" adaptation of
Ruskinian principles of
architecture.
Sage Hall at
Cornell
ØRejection 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.
12.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
Ruskin’s drawings
and descriptions
Ruskin’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 Window Study of
minutes details. detail tracery
Architectural surface are
studied as if they have a
depth ,a depth however
that has nothing to do with
the structure of their actual
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
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.”
 Conclusio
n
•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
References:-

• Wikipedia, the free

encyclopedia.
• Google search.
• Seniors.
• The Stones of Venice: Vol. II (
eBook).
•The Seven Lamps of