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, where he studied the figurative arts in depth.
An admirer of pre-Renaissance art, he came to believe that only such art was genuine, inasmuch as it manifested a sincere religious feeling and a genuine love of virtue and truth—qualities, in his judgment, absent from the great Renaissance art. On the basis of these principles he waged war on the industrialism dominant in his age and launched a long campaign for a return to the ideals of life and art of the Middle Ages. He did not, however, grasp 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 consistency with the premises of his theory on 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. interests contemporaries mainly as an art critic and for his masterly prose, but one must not forget that many of the reforms he advocated have come to pass and that R. has recently been reassessed even 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).