INTRODUCTION xxxix

She was wisely sympathetic to him, and Ruskin on his side did much by kindness and thoughtful generosity to cheer her closing years. He threw himself also into work of a more public character. His acquaintance with F. D. Maurice, which will presently be referred to (p. lxxv.), gave one opportunity for this in connexion with the Working Men’s College. Other work of a similar kind was that which he did in lecturing in the late autumn of this year at the Architectural Museum. A full report of these lectures is given below (pp. 474-508); they form the latest in date of the Papers collected in the present volume. At this point, therefore, we break off the biographical thread, and turn back to notice in their order the contents of the volume which follow the Edinburgh Lectures.

II

The Second Part of the volume contains various Papers on Art, written by Ruskin between the years 1847 and 1854. The first is a Review of Lord Lindsay’s Sketches of the History of Christian Art.¹ The circumstances in which this work was undertaken for the Quarterly (June 1847) have been already noticed (Vol. VIII. p. xxiv.). Ruskin was wont to refer to Lord Lindsay as his “first master in Italian art.”²

¹ In connexion with this Review of Lord Lindsay, Ruskin’s other references to the author and his book may usefully be collected. The author was Alexander William Crawford, Baron Lindsay, 25th Earl of Crawford and 8th Earl of Balcarres. His Sketches of the History of Christian Art was published in 1847. Ruskin says in Præterita, and in the Epilogue to the second volume of Modern Painters, that this book had prepared him for his study of early Christian Art in 1845, but (as already noted, Vol. IV. p. xxiii. n.) in looking back he ante-dated Lord Lindsay’s influence. The earliest reference to the book, other than the Review, is in The Seven Lamps (1849), where he refers to Lord Lindsay’s observations on finish in art (Vol. VIII. p. 197, and see below, p. 232). Later on, in a note to the 1880 edition, Ruskin again refers to Lord Lindsay’s estimate of Byzantine architecture as anticipating his own (Vol. VIII. p. 121). In the first volume of The Stones of Venice (1851) he makes a passing criticism on the metaphysical distinctions in Lord Lindsay’s “noble book,” and refers to the author as “a man from whom I have learned much” (Vol. IX. p. 67, and cf. p. 445); later in the same volume, Lord Lindsay’s “opposition of good and evil, the antagonism of the entire human system” is cited with approval (ibid., p. 306). In Stones of Venice, vol. ii., there are references to Lord Lindsay’s remarks on Basilicas (Vol. X. p. 22 n.) and on St. Mark’s (ibid., p. 138 n.), and several to his notes on Giotto’s frescoes at Assisi (ibid., pp. 384, 392, 400). In the Lectures on Architecture and Painting, a passage from the book is cited as the best “preface to an essay on civil architecture” (below, p. 8). When he came to write on Giotto and his Works in Padua, Ruskin had repeated occasion to refer to Lord Lindsay (see that work, passim). In later books Ruskin often reverted to Lindsay’s work as a pioneer in the explanation of Christian art and Christian mythology; see Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. ii. § 4, The Eagle’s Nest, § 46, The Art of England, § 47; while in Mornings in Florence, Lindsay is again frequently cited.

² Val d’ Arno, § 264; and compare The Eagle’s Nest, § 46.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]