Eclectic Review, June 1856
(Go to Summary of review of Modern Painters
III, Eclectic Review, June 1856, pp. 545-63
Mr Ruskin has deservedly won for himself a place in the
first rank of modern writers upon the theory of the Fine Arts. There is
an earnestness and independence about him, which rivets the attention of
the reader, and enlists his sympathies on the side of convictions so strongly
felt, and so fearlessly expressed... The impress of his mind has been indelibly
stamped upon the Art-literature of the day, and he has already, in part,
effected a revolution in the popular estimate of modern, as compared with
ancient, landscape painters. His works are often, indeed, censured as impertinent,
or condemned as heretical, but they are universally sought after and read,
in spite of his avowed contempt for time-honoured canons of Art, and for
the authority of great names. He combines, in his own person, some of the
highest qualities of the literary man and the artists. (p. 545)
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The author of Modern Painters is a strange compound of inconsistencies
and peculiarities. He is constantly preaching humility, yet he is of all
men the most dogmatic, and least tolerant of opposition or contradiction.
He is the greatest iconoclast of our days, and yet a devoted worshipper
of idols. (p. 545-46)
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He seems to forget that the Fine Arts are merely the offspring
of man's intense love of the beautiful, but not essential to his existence
or prosperity, and that although they may indicate the tendencies of an
age, as the vane does the direction of the wind, they are yet incapable
of determining its character, or fixing its destinies. (p. 546)
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Another error into which Mr Ruskin has fallen, arises... from his attaching
undue importance to the influence of religious feeling in Art, and also,
from his not sufficiently attending to the true nature of that feeling,
upon which he lays so much stress. (p. 546)
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The meagre forms, hard colouring, and defective drawing of
the Italian artists of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, are all
overlooked and forgotten, in deference to the presence of this pervading
religious feeling... The religious feeling may be so strong as to impair
or absorb the intellectual and aesthetical. No one can dispute the existence
of this feeling among the Puritans and Scottish Covenanters, yet they hated,
despised, and destroyed art. (p. 547)
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As to the religious feeling of those early Italian painters,
what was it, after all, but a sentimental idolatry, which lavished upon
the Virgin and the Saints, the worship intended for God alone. We are far
from wishing to undervalue the importance of religious feeling to the artist,
or the deep propriety of his always cherishing a lofty sense of the importance
of his vocation... but at the same time, we do not think that the mere presence
of that feeling justifies or excuses technical deficiencies, or that great
artistic excellence and deep religious feeling have any necessary connexion.
(p. 548)
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Those who have studied Mr Ruskin's writings will be prepared
to find, in the present volume, many eloquent and glowing descriptions of
natural scenery, similar to those which distinguished his former works...
His exquisite picture of the sad and desolate Campagna of Rome, in a former
part of Modern Painters, may be paralleled, if not surpassed, by
several passages in the present volume. (p. 562)
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