RUSKIN, JOHN. – English art critic and sociologist, born in London on 8 February 1819, died at Brantwood (Lancashire) on 20 January 1900. He defended Turner’s impressionism in Modern painters (2 vols., published respectively in 1843 and ’46). He spent a long time in Italy, where he studied the figurative arts in depth.
An admirer of pre-Renaissance art, he came to the conviction that only such art was genuine, since it manifested a sincere religious feeling and an authentic love of virtue and truth—qualities that, in his judgment, were absent from the great Renaissance art. In the name of these principles he waged war against the industrialism dominant in his age and began a long campaign for a return to the ideals of life and art of the Middle Ages. He did not, however, understand the true religious aspect of those periods and, unlike the proponents of the «Oxford Movement», although their views partly coincided with his own, he was an uncompromising Puritan and anti-Catholic. In full accordance with the premises of his theory concerning the ethical purpose of the arts, he turned to the study of the society that had produced them and directed his attention to social problems, becoming a militant sociologist. R. is of primary interest to his contemporaries as an art critic and for his masterly prose, but it must not be forgotten that many of the reforms he advocated have become realities, and R. has recently also been reassessed in his role as a social prophet.
He wrote: Modern painters (2 vols., 1843–46); The seven lamps of architecture (1849); The stones of Venice (1851–53); Pre-Raphaelitism (1851); Unto this last (1862); Time and tide (1867); Sesame and lilies (1868); Fors clavigera (1871–84); Munera pulveris (1872).