RUSKIN, JOHN. - English art critic and sociologist, b. in London on 8 Feb. 1819, d. at Brantwood (Lancashire) on 20 Jan. 1900. He defended Turner's impressionism in Modern painters (2 vols., published respectively in 1843 and '46). He spent a long time in Italy, and there studied the figurative arts in depth.
An admirer of pre-Renaissance art, he came to the conviction that only such art was genuine, inasmuch as it manifested a sincere religious feeling and an authentic love of virtue and truth, characteristics in his judgment absent from the great Renaissance art. In the name of these principles he waged war on 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 epochs and, unlike the supporters of the "Oxford Movement," although their views coincided in part with his, he was an intransigent Puritan and anti-Catholic. In full coherence with the premises of his theory on the ethical purpose of the arts, he went back to the study of the society that had expressed them and turned his attention to social problems, transforming himself into a militant sociologist. R. interests his contemporaries principally as an art critic and for his masterly prose, but it must not be forgotten that many of the reforms he advocated have been translated into reality and R. has recently been reappraised also in this role of 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).
Bibliography3 works
Augusto Guidi