Section 4, Chapter 7, of the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
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he image of the organic body is one form of Ruskin's vision of a new and revolutionary integration of art and society; a second form is the metaphor of art as wealth. This analogy implies, first, that art, like economic wealth, supplies a human need and so is the birthright of all, and second, that useful things, like works of art, should be well made and treated as the expressions of human hearts and hands. But the idea of preciousness also implies something not useful and not dispersed [175/176] and so emphasizes the relations of art to the costly, the luxurious, and the exclusive.
In "The Lamp of Sacrifice," Ruskin justified the use of precious materials in architecture by arguing that churches could have human value only by an act of renunciation -- by withdrawing the best products from the economy of useful objects. By implication beauty can signify only if it is sanctified, that is, set aside in a special category of the rare and costly. Ruskin retains these assumptions in the secular context of The Political Economy of Art, where his insistence on the production and flow of art is countered by an equally strong insistence on the necessary scarcity of precious things. He suggests, therefore, that his audience never buy copies, that the diffusion of art be limited by high prices, that painters train rigorously in "trial schools." He laments the passing of a true goldsmith's art in England, since for him gold has a sacramental and permanent character -- it is, so to speak, the type of all types, since it has value in itself and as a symbol of value. "At every marriage, and at every birth, get a new piece of gold or silver if you will, but with noble workmanship on it, done for all time, and put it among your treasures; that is one of the chief things which gold was made for, and made incorruptible for." It is also the best substance for a young artist to train with, since it induces care and reverence ("he dares not scrawl on gold, and he cannot play with it"; XVI, 47, 46). These comments resurrect the dead metaphor of "social refinement" into a theory of enthusiastic moral influence: like the alchemical elixir, art touches into gold, or refines, the sensibility of the possessor and the creating artist. (The pun reinforces the hierarchical nature of enthusiasm, since the masses presumably can be refined only by those who have refinement.)
Gold, then, perpetuates in concrete form the relations of tradition and of social hierarchy. The precious materials of the tabernacle induced awe similar to that of contemplating the heavens, which it imitates in the form of the tent and its golden rings, and therefore also establishes the Mosaic theocracy. According to Blake's myth, Urizen created the heavens in the form of a tabernacle, which upholds the repressive alliance of priest, king, and Newtonian philosopher. Ruskin cannot, of course, agree that religious sacrifice has the same structure as social repression -- it has instead the same structure as human interchange, of recognizing oneself as related to others, as we will see again in a moment. For him the difference between oppression and justice is the use, not the abolition, of property; and the symbols attaching themselves to property may signify oppression or mutual support.
Ruskin's art economy aims to establish a middle ground between two extremes -- the extremes of art hoarded as a symbol of class oppression and art devalued by the mechanisms of a mass market. John Berger, drawing upon Walter Benjamin, has expressed a similar opposition:
[176/177]The experience of art, which at first was the experience of ritual, was set apart from the rest of life -- precisely in order to be able to exercise power over it.... What the modern means of reproduction have done is to destroy the authority of art and to remove it -- or, rather, to remove its images which they reproduce -- from any preserve. For the first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free. They surround us in the same way as a language surrounds us. They have entered the mainstream of life over which they no longer, in themselves, have power. [32]
Ruskin could not foresee the extent to which photographs would overwhelm the public experience of art in the twentieth century, but his object of attack is the same as Berger's: the ability of an economic elite to render art powerless by dispersing it. For Ruskin the laissez-faire market submits intrinsic value to ready profits: cheap, hasty, ephemeral work is encouraged; reputations are inflated for their market value; artworks are converted into symbols of ostentation -- degraded, that is, into mere commodities. For this reason Ruskin reinstitutes the values of artisanship and recommends that all artists be paid the same amount. (According to Ruskin the present system of unequal rewards incites competitive envy and eliminates all but the most talented producers.) Purchased and loved for their intrinsic value, works of art would then truly adorn the homes and public places of England.
The argument is crucial to Ruskin, since for him the false use of wealth signals the moment of a nation's decline, yet when we notice his giving friendly advice to manufacturers on the purchase of gold and jewels and expensive pictures, the distinction seems elusive. And so it is -- in pessimistic moments, Ruskin doubted that it could be made. The point is that only in its character as wealth, as something rare and precious, can art sanctify. Every purchase is therefore a statement of what the owner chooses to express and affirm. An interior decorated in ostentatious bad taste signifies simply that the owner is in successful competition with others. He or she has no self to affirm, only the denomination of status, and makes purchases that have meaning as counters, not in themselves -- they are inorganic, like money. But a well-adorned home grows from a genuine home love, the ability to love things outside of oneself, such as one's descendants, and Ruskin plays on this emotion in the Manchester lectures by calling national economy the "law of the house." Where one's heart is, there is one's treasure also. This notion of course implies class power, but without a conception of benevolent class power, the very notion of society is inconceivable to Ruskin. Social wealth is for him -- as landed property was for Burke -- a "sluggish" element preserving the texture of tradition and [177/178] substantializing the bases of social order. It can also sanctify communal bonds -- in public decorations portraying the human figure, for example -- even when it is not set aside for religious purposes. Reclaiming the physical body of society, it returns to man (in Marx's phrase) what is man's.
In the broadest terms, Ruskin's art economy seeks to overcome the opposition between artist and society of which romanticism is both the symptom and the protest. In particular it does so by addressing the problems raised by the collapse of the old patronage system -- the world of Sir Joshua Reynolds and his predecessors, the world of the Pope and the court. The old system demanded that the artist serve a wealthy elite, but at least the demands were clear and the audience present and personal. The new system subjects the artist to impersonal market forces, governed by an impersonal audience that tends to buy artworks as mere symbols of wealth and position. The system Ruskin proposes instead also implies a theoretical orientation different from the romantic assumptions of his books on painting. According to the earlier description of art production, great art is the individual expression of a great mind, doomed by its superior vision to some degree of misunderstanding. The artist's subject is a revelation through symbols of the divine structure of nature and the religious destiny of human beings; inspiration comes suddenly, from beyond, when the artist is unselfconscious and oblivious to any audience. The artist's aim and subject are expressed by the metaphor of life. In the later account, the artist is a kind of worker or craftsman whose innate gift must be sternly disciplined ("sifting, melting, hammering, purifying" the art gift (XVI, 30]); the product is an artifact rather than a spontaneous expression, one that is relatively scarce and costly; the artist fulfills the desire of a patron or community for decoration, either of a home or a useful object or a public place. The first description stresses private inspiration, the second social usefulness. Can they be reconciled either in theory or practice?
Ruskin implies a reconciliation by providing an ideal image of an earlier period in history, one that like the present was not primarily an age of faith. Given his argument in The Stones of Venice, he is understandably tacit about that reference, but in the lectures of the late 1 850s he clearly has in mind the Italian Renaissance -- not the Renaissance of the yellow Dogaressa and the degenerate grotesques of Santa Maria Formosa, but the Pisa of Nino and the Venice of Veronese. If this period (as Ruskin viewed it at any rate) absorbed itself in the pride of life, it absorbed itself in the "splendour of life" as well -- that paradox surely fascinated Browning, who depicted a prototype of Ruskin's Cardinal Maurice in his Bishop of Praxed and perhaps also a prototype of Ruskin's Veronese in Fra Lippo Lippi, with his vigor and dodges and [178/179] reverence for the "nobly animal." The system of workshops, patrons, and commissions permitted the flowering of a genius as wayward as Fra Lippo or Tintoretto. "Ghirlandajo was a goldsmith, and was the master of Michelangelo," Ruskin reminded his audience at Manchester; "Verrocchio was a goldsmith, and was the master of Leonardo da Vinci. Ghiberti was a goldsmith, and beat out the bronze gates which Michelangelo said might serve for gates of Paradise" (XVI, 46). From workshop to the Heavenly City: the progression captures precisely Ruskin's joining of genius and artist, of self-expression and decoration and of religious subject and social use. The Scuola di San Rocco and the Ducal Palace, we recall, are both secular institutions; and the Sistine frescoes, those prototypically sublime creations, are decorations.
The syntheses subtly but forcefully displace some tendencies in romantic criticism. Raymond Williams has suggested that the romantic doctrine of genius compensates for the poet's feeling of isolation and inutility, a feeling partly caused by an impersonal market that treats works of art as commodities like any other. For Williams, romantic theory tends to isolate an "artistic sensibility": "Under pressure, art became a symbolic abstraction for a whole range of general human experience: a valuable abstraction, because indeed great art has this ultimate power; yet an abstraction nevertheless, because a general social activity was forced into the status of a department or province, and actual works of art were in part converted into a self-pleading ideology" (47). Ruskin's metaphor of art as wealth moves away from the more self-isolating of romantic attitudes -- the absorption in private and merely nostalgic emotions (criticized in "Of the Pathetic Fallacy"), and the contempt for the ordinary and the material -- toward a view of art as a social activity. Art is the type of noble human life, that is, a paradigm and symbolic expression of it, and for that reason comparable with other paradigms and expressions of human nobility. Ruskin's art economy would therefore integrate art into the general social life, both as a profession and as a category, while at the same time revolutionizing the idea of a commodity, the idea of giving and possessing and using.
The metaphor of wealth then applies also to the private experience of art, which for Ruskin is inseparable from questions of its exchange and public use. The King of the Golden River is a fable showing that true possession comes of giving, or rather that giving and receiving are a single process -- just as, for Portia, mercy blesses the giver and is "mightiest in the mightiest." The Manchester lectures make the point of the fable explicit and thereby anticipate one of the great ideas of Unto This Last by defining possession not as a legal or material fact but [179/180] as an open-ended activity, with benefits and consequences analogous to the interchange of affections. Wealth is anything so possessed. In an addendum to The Political Economy of Art Ruskin lists five kinds of valuable things: that which is necessary to life and must be labored for (food, clothing, and shelter); that which "conduces to bodily pleasures and conveniences"; that which "bestows intellectual or emotional pleasure"; and money. Only the fourth of these, he says, can be truly possessed, since one does not speak of a "wealth of air" and since "the things that give intellectual or emotional enjoyment may be accumulated, and do not perish in using; but continually supply new pleasures and new powers of giving pleasures to others. And these, therefore, are the only things which can rightly be thought of as giving 'wealth' or 'well being.' Food conduces only to 'being,' but these to 'well being'" (XVI, 133-134). In some sense, then, "well" being is productive, like seeds or interest.
Probably Ruskin's vividest explication of this idea occurs in a passage in Praeterita, which, though written many years later, captures perfectly the spirit of his art economy. It appears in "The Grand Chartreuse," an extended meditation on religion and treasure that also describes his unconversion at Turin. His nature, he says there, is "a worker's and a miser's," for "though I am generous too, and love giving, yet my notion of charity is not at all dividing my last crust with a beggar, but riding through a town like a Commander of the Faithful, having any quantity of sequins and ducats in saddle-bags (where cavalry officers have holsters for their pistols), and throwing them round in radiant showers and hailing handfuls; with more bags to brace on when those were empty" (XXXV, 491). The importance of this image rests in its context: it follows a general account of Ruskin's interest in Catholicism and a particular recollection of his first missal, a "little fourteenth-century Hours of the Virgin, not of refined work, but extremely rich, grotesque, and full of pure colour." He then describes the well-illuminated missal in general as "a fairy cathedral full of painted windows, bound together to carry in one's pocket, with the music and the blessing of all its prayers besides." The whole train of thought unites fantasy ("caskets of jewels in the Arabian Nights" and Aladdin's palaces "with jewel windows"), sensuous splendor, religious devotion, and eroticism -- particularly in regard to Rose La Touche, who in her connection with wealth and time is one of the leitmotifs of these late chapters of Praeterita. The image of Ruskin with a missal in his pocket, which he compares to a girl and her doll, gives way to Ruskin as a horseman with saddlebags of sequins and ducats. Wealth and the virgin are united as things one loves, both sanctified -- the Virgin by her virtue, jewels by association with purity and with color, which Ruskin called the sanctifying element of creation; the blessings in the missal translate into the [180/181] spray of blessing falling from Ruskin's hand. The images also solidify time: the old gift (an Hours of the Virgin, suggesting time ordered by a cycle of deeds) issues in an ideal present, with the jeweled shower recalling the jeweled spray of St. Mark's. Once again preciousness is an arrest of the transient, a conversion of time from loss to gain. The missal, then, acts as the storehouse of memory, the incorporation specifically of a woman's benevolence, which issues also as power. The associations with Aladdin, the Commander of the Faithful, and a holster suggest masculinity, but the energy of giving is neither specifically masculine or feminine. The object in this sense becomes an icon, containing energy. The passage as a whole suggests that Ruskin has indeed substituted art for religion, or rather has incorporated religion into art, not in the fashion of the 1890s -- not as the ritualization of sensuous experience in isolation from actuality and not as the delicious ache of Paterian impressionism -- but as a means of ordering and channeling the moral energies. I offer this as a gloss on "the things that give intellectual or emotional enjoyment . . ., continually supply new pleasures and new powers of giving pleasures to others." Because the work of art is possessed iconically, as a source of magical power, possession becomes giving; the activity of having and giving, in other words, takes the structure of affection -- and this, we have seen, is the burden of The Political Economy of Art. Ultimately, the association of love with economic interchange would revolutionize the present wage system and also the conception of human relationship of which, for Ruskin, the wage system is an enactment. For in the present economy, wages are given only as specific rewards, according to a capricious and irrelevant standard, forcing the worker into a competitive and exhausting subservience under the terms of which, so to speak, he can never be justified. He can be justified, however, when paid at a fixed rate -- that is, unconditionally. Truly to possess a work of art, to possess it as the inexhaustible gift of a creative spirit, is analogous to the unconditional possession of love, a forgetfulness of evil that is also the power to bless and affirm others.
The analogy was valid for Ruskin, at least, as we will see again in discussing the experience of Veronese at Turin. The danger of such a view of art, of course, is that art (like money or any other fetishized object) can become a substitute for love, a magical preservation of the personal past and of individual autonomy conceived as a bulwark against the risks and rewards of human intimacy. Ruskin understood the risks only too well. Now, however, we should turn from Ruskin's private pleasure in art to his theory of the value it could hold for all, which will give us the chance to take a final look at his aesthetic theory in general.
At the beginning of his career Ruskin described paintings as occasions [181/182] for rapture, objects that efface themselves in order to induce overwhelming experiences of union with divine forces and the artist's own charismatic power. But in the 1850s he began to think of art as objects to be treasured, recognizing their character as stored experience -- experience that can be appropriated, moved, shared, preserved -- so that the aesthetic transaction moves in both directions, with artist and beholder mutually sustaining each other. Second, he began seeing aesthetic emotion not only as the ego's experience of power and fullness but also as the self's delight in affectionate and charitable feelings, for which having and giving offer a metaphor. Third, he began to value the sensuous qualities of art -- color, pattern, precious materials, craftsmanship and other marks of labor -- as a sacramental gesture, a response conferring value upon a particular activity or, in its broadest sense, affirming a social covenant. The object treasured may be as large as a cathedral or as small as a missal, a cathedral that can literally fit in a person's pocket; the relationship between the two suggests that the metaphor of treasuring (like the metaphor of sustenance) explains once again how the world is brought into the individual human being -- how seeing is incorporating. The metaphor of art as treasure, in both its public and its private uses, suggests also that great art is related to crafts and decoration by degree, not by opposition: with a place made for inferior skill (as in a Gothic cathedral), great art loses its privileged isolation from the socially useful but without sacrificing its greatness. In romantic criticism this is a paradox for several reasons, one of which is that the self-expression of genius cannot always be and perhaps ought not to be efficacious for a communal audience. This conflict is resolvable only, if at all, in specific social circumstances, but Ruskin takes a major step in that direction by reinterpreting the romantic opposition of subjective and objective. For Ruskin that opposition is meaningless because all expression is representation of something outside the individual artist that is objectively knowable. The field of representation is an intelligible sensorium composed of facts and symbols that the critic can interpret. How much intelligibility rests in the structure of nature and how much in the structure of the collective human mind makes, finally, little practical difference. Even the most grotesque distortions and juxtapositions of inspired seeing can be interpreted according to a vocabulary of traditional symbols, most of them biblical types, as Ruskin showed in the allegorical exegeses of Modern Painters V. All good artists, then, from the humble draftsman to the inspired genius, express portions of the revelation, which in its variegated and collective pattern forms the human heritage, the decoration of the eternal city of man.
In discussing Modern Painters II I suggested that Ruskin's theories of imagination tended to settle into complementary poles of aesthetic experience, one associated with intellectual grasp, sublimity, and masculine [182/183] power, the other with contemplation, tranquility, and a sensuous, usually feminine, beauty. Although some artists are better described than others by a given set of terms (compare Angelico and Tintoretto and Turner, for example), Ruskin's developing metaphor of art as wealth makes clear that the polarity is really two ways of viewing art in general. Just as purity, the type of divine energy, may be regarded as a dynamic system or as a pure and luminous object, so every great work of art is at once a system of life or energy and a precious object containing that system -- either an energy to be experienced in self-forgetfulness or an artifact to be treasured in the closest possible subject-object relationship. Wealth is life seen from a different angle. This schema, of course, imitates the structure of a symbol or incarnate word, which similarly contains the translucence of the eternal in the particular. If we step back very far, Ruskin's theory of art becomes a theory of incarnation by which art imitates the divine recognition, "And lo, it was very good." This is the reason why all great art is praise -- praise not in the sense of blinkered optimism or even of a simple Christian piety but in the sense with which we began, a full-sighted affirmation of connection uttered in that hieroglyphic language through which subject and object become one.
Can art so conceived -- indeed can any activity of full-sighted affirmation -- endure in industrial England? Can the symbolic imagination perform the alchemy by which the inorganic body of England would be transformed into an energy of purity? Within a few years of the Manchester lectures Ruskin renounced this possibility, as happens so often with him, a moment of synthesis yielded before new pressures of thought and feeling. In 1858 he told the manufacturers at Bradford that great art was impossible in a polluted and inhuman environment. He had in the meantime discovered in the Turner Bequest a painter more disturbing and violent than he had permitted himself to discover before, a painter whose unsparing view of "the labour and sorrow and passing away of men" and whose savagely incessant mockery of the fallacies of hope brought him in his last years to a vision of Apocalyptic destruction. How could even the most benevolently disposed of Ruskin's Manchester audience possess as true wealth the terrible grotesques Ruskin revealed in the final volume of Modern Painters? The logic of his art economy, however optimistic in tone, could lead only to the open declaration of war on capitalist society that is contained in Unto This Last; for Ruskin understood more passionately and more precisely perhaps than any other thinker of his time the historical relationships of social production and artistic creativity. His theory of aesthetic wealth, then, is a contingent defense awaiting a social transformation, since to transform people's souls, art requires the instincts for sanctifying and remembering and revering and treasuring that are destroyed by a commercial system that cheapens its commodities as it [183/184] debases the sensibility of both producer and user. Art feeds the instincts for community; laissez-faire perverts them into selfishness. The years from 1855 to 1860 are the turning point of Ruskin's career, not because he switched subjects then -- that shift is gradual and consistent - but because he abandoned altogether the hopefulness of the first stage in the three-part model of romantic self-development in favor of an acceptance of the Fall so uncompromising that it threatened to tear apart the very unity of self. Ruskin never wrote a crisis autobiography or indeed any book detailing the transition from despair to sober reconstruction but moved instead into a creatively unstable period dominated by apocalyptic images of hope and despair. Two important encounters during these years, occurring in the shadow of his growing religious disillusionment, crystallized the new transition. These were the experience of Veronese in Turin and the work with the Turner Bequest, issuing in the great final chapters of Modern Painters V.
Leon, Derrick. Ruskin, the Great Victorian (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1949), 277; for Ruskin and Jones, see Leon, 245.
Houghton, Walter. The Victorian Frame of Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 264.
Ruskin, John. Victorian Sage: The Example of 'Traffic,' in New Approaches to Ruskin. ed. Robert Hewison (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981)
Berger. John. Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 32.
Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press. 1958), 47.
Helsinger, Elizabeth. Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, l982), 243.
Last modified December 2000