III. The House of Life
What marks the mid-century point as decisive is the split that occurs somewhere around 1850/51 between the subjective and objective (i.e., Subjective ≠ Objective). Up to that point, we’ve seen a growing inability to hold together that fusion of subjective and objective posited by Hegel in his movement of Substance Subject. Instead, what we get is at best S ⇒ S/O ⇒ 
If the subjective/objective split is what marks the mid-century, then the Janus-face that hovers over this moment, looking both forward and backward, is John Ruskin. On the one hand Ruskin distinctly looks backward, to the kind of symbolism we find in the early Romantic period, where natural objects reveal (as Coleridge put it) the “translucence of the Eternal in and through the Temporal.” The “natural supernaturalism,” in other words, of Thomas Carlyle. It’s the belief in this kind of symbolic relationship between natural objects and a kind of immanent divine presence that makes possible the project of Modern Painters. It only makes sense to spend 5 volumes talking about organic forms if you believe they somehow express a divine order within things. Because the kind of organic forms Ruskin is talking about in Modern Painters aren’t really just defined by a necessary relation between their parts (as Kant would have it). Instead, they’re clearly shot through with a kind of luminescence, a splendor that can come only from a belief that these organic forms, these natural objects, are expressive of something beyond what they are. Yet even as Ruskin was turning out one volume after another of Modern Painters (most of which hardly discuss painters at all), he was also engaged in a very different kind of project, one that would take shape in the 3-volume work called Stones of Venice that appeared in 1851. And this, you might say, is the other side of the Janus-face. This is the face that looks forward to what would become, increasingly, the tendency of the later nineteenth century. In Stones of Venice what Ruskin put forward was a kind of constructivism that had nothing to do with nature, one based on purely formal architectural principles that could be combined to create the churches and palaces of Venice. It was, then, no accident that Ruskin called his work Stones of Venice: he meant, I take it, to refer specifically to those building blocks this new constructivism would employ, out of which it would create new, distinctly human edifices. But the constructivism doesn’t end with Ruskin. At almost exactly the same time Ruskin was finishing Stones of Venice, a massive new structure of cast-iron and glass went up in London that would go far beyond anything he had in mind in his study of the architecture of Venice: the Crystal Palace, or—to call it by its more technical name—the building designed to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. Ruskin would recoil from it in horror, as he did from so much of the later 19th century work he had done so much to anticipate and even to spawn. Nevertheless, we can find at the heart of it the same kind of constructive principle we find in Stones itself: the sense that a small number of architectural motifs can be combined and multiplied almost indefinitely to create an entire structure. At the end, we’ll see how this same principle has a long afterlife, extending even into the late twentieth century. In Stones, however, Ruskin didn’t just anticipate late 19th and even late 20th century constructivism. He also—and this is another aspect of his Janus-face—looks forward to the increasing subjectivism of late 19th century painting, and specifically its preoccupation with color as an element independent of linear definition and even of any kind of figural specificity altogether. In this he wasn’t alone—Turner, you might say, was there before him. But the presence of a similar color preoccupation in Stones, and the way in which it gradually comes to achieve autonomy from anything like Nature, or natural objects, offer a distinct hint of what is to come, and specifically of what we’ll find when we look at Whistler, Wilde and Pater. Yet Ruskin would savagely reject Whistler, even though the groundwork of so much of what we find in Whistler was already there in Turner. Take it as one more index of the difficult and complex process by which a new formative principle comes to be.
It’s now time to turn to Ruskin’s Venice. And for that we can do no better, I think, than to look at how Ruskin himself introduces it:
Now we can see nothing but what seems a low and monotonous dockyard wall, with flat arches to let the tide through it;–this is the railroad bridge, conspicuous above all things. But at the end of those dismal arches there rises, out of the wide water, a straggling line of low and confused brick buildings, which, but for the many towers which are mingled among them, might be the suburbs of an English manufacturing town. Four or five domes, pale, and apparently at a greater distance, rise over the centre of the line; but the object which first catches the eye is a sullen cloud of black smoke brooding over the northern half of it, and which issues from the belfry of a church. It is Venice. (Works IX, 415)
Here Ruskin seems firmly determined to give no more to Venice than what’s strictly necessary—the minimalist perspective, you might say, on what first catches the visitor’s eye. And yet, in retrospect, we can see it all as quite deliberate. Because what Ruskin wants to emphasize is precisely what Venice has in common with the ugliest English manufacturing town: that both are cities built from the same general constructive principles, so that what distinguishes Venice from Manchester or Sheffield isn’t that its formative principles are so much better but simply that in Venice they were developed further, until they became something like aesthetic architecture.
If you look carefully, you’ll notice how these 3 forms of arches manage the stress of overhead weight in a progressively more complex way. The 1st is a simple plinth that stretches from one pillar over to the other, placed so as to support all the weight above. The 2nd makes use of 2 plinths propped against each other. Here the stress management is more sophisticated: because of the angle, all the burden of the weight above flows away on either side of the central point. Finally, the 3rd form, the arch, is the most sophisticated of the 3 because it works to distribute the burden of the weight over the whole curve of the arch. So much for pure functionalism.
With his treatment of color in the same work, however, Ruskin would push this tendency much farther. After a full discussion of architectural forms or motifs in vol. I, Ruskin moves on in vol. II to talk about the use of color in St. Mark’s Basilica. Significantly, he begins by pointing out the relative neglect of color in aesthetic appreciation:
The perception of colour is a gift just as definitely granted to one person, and denied to another, as an ear for music; and the very first requisite for true judgment of St. Mark’s, is the perfection of that colour-faculty which few people ever set themselves seriously to find out whether they possess or not. For it is on its value as a piece of perfect and unchangeable colouring, that the claims of this edifice to our respect are finally rested…. It possesses the charm of colour in common with the greater part of the architecture, as well as of the manufactures, of the East; but the Venetians deserve especial note as the only European people who appear to have sympathized to the full with the great instinct of the Eastern races. (Works X, 97-98)
At first it seems almost as if Ruskin just wants to highlight one of the more esoteric architectural qualities. But then he goes on to say: “For it is on its value as a piece of perfect and unchangeable colouring, that the claims of this edifice to our respect are finally rested.” What??? After all that discussion of wall and pier bases, cornices, capitals, and roofs, to be told that only color matters? What’s going on here? Clearly Ruskin’s moving away from the marriage of form + function that dominated vol. I. But it isn’t just about a shift to a different architectural principle. Although it’s possible to see color as a kind of architectural ornament, we can also see how it might be possible to consider it quite independently of architecture altogether.
Later, in fact, Ruskin offers just that—a discussion of color that’s more or less independent of architecture:
The fact is, we none of us enough appreciate the nobleness and sacredness of colour. Nothing is more common than to hear it spoken of as a subordinate beauty. Such expressions are used for the most part in thoughtlessness; and if the speakers would only take the pains to imagine what the world and their own existence would become, if the blue were taken from the sky, and the gold from the sunshine, and the verdue from the leaves, and the crimson from the blood which is the life of man, the flush from the cheek, the darkness from the eye, the radiance from the hair,–if they could but see, for an instant, white human creatures living in a white world,– they would soon feel what they owe to colour. The fact is, that, of all God’s gifts to the sight of man, colour is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn. We speak rashly of gay colour and sad colour, for colour cannot at once be good and gay. All good colour is in some degree pensive, the loveliest is melancholy, and the purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most. (Works X, 172-73)
We might almost be reading Melville’s famous meditation on whiteness and color in“The Whiteness of the Whale” from Moby-Dick, published, significantly, the very same year as Stones of Venice. When Ruskin speaks of the “nobleness” and “sacredness” of color (and, later, of color as “the holiest, the most divine, and the most solemn” of God’s gifts), he clearly has something more in mind than just architectural ornament. Specifically, I would argue that by shifting his perspective to color on natural objects what Ruskin wants to put forward is a new concept of symbolism. It’s different from the symbolism of Modern Painters because it has nothing to do with the organic, or with the forms found in nature. Instead, Ruskin seems to be working around to a more subjective notion of symbolism. After all, color exists only in the perceiver’s eye. And that would suggest Ruskin believes the source of the sacredness of color comes ultimately from the mind itself, rather than from God or nature.
And perhaps it’s this latent implication that leads to the final discussion of color in Stones vol. II, where the primacy passes from color in nature to color considered purely by itself—in other words, color arrangement or harmony:
We are to remember… that the arrangement of colours and lines is an art analogous to the composition of music, and entirely independent of the representation of facts. Good colouring does not necessarily convey the image of anything but itself. It consists in certain proportions and arrangements of rays of light, but not in likeness to anything. A few touches of certain greys and purples laid by a master’s hand on white paper will be good colouring; as more touches are added beside them, we may find out that they were intended to represent a dove’s neck, and we may praise, as the drawing advances, the perfect imitation of the dove’s neck. But the good colouring does not consist in that imitation, but in the abstract qualities and relations of the grey and purple. (Works X, 215-16)
I remember years ago being in the Prado in Madrid, face to face with a Velasquez portrait of one of the royal princesses, and noticing that the whole painting wasn’t really about any royal princess at all, but just about a particular kind of color harmony between different shades of vermilion red and gray. It’s the same principle here. Notice how careful Ruskin is to emphasize that the use of color is not representational: “entirely independent of the representation of facts… does not necessarily convey the image of anything but itself.” And obviously, once he puts forward the analogy between color arrangement and musical composition, any sense of color as representational disappears completely. Later, we’ll see how the same idea gets taken up by Whistler in his Nocturne in Black and Gold and his Nocturne in Blue and Gold—2 works Ruskin would violently, and very publicly, criticize. Here, however, he’s obviously not worried (as he will be later) about representational likeness at all. On the contrary, he even goes on to suggest that the real base of a master painter’s depiction of a dove isn’t the attempt to portray its likeness at all, but rather an effort to create a particular color arrangement of gray and purple. His sense that the painter was primarily interested in “the abstract qualities and relations of the grey and the purple” shows that this color harmony, in Ruskin’s mind, has now acquired complete autonomy, to the extent that it— rather than the natural dove—becomes the formative principle behind the painter’s work.
I’ve tried to arrange these in a sequence determined roughly by the time of day they might conceivably represent. So we begin with PPT 3.4 which looks like dawn. Note the low, straggling line of buildings at the skyline, much as described by Ruskin in his initial approach to Venice at the end of Stones vol. I. These are indistinct enough—just a blue wash, really—but even more so are the boats in the foreground, indicated only by single curved reddish-brown strokes that are even allowed to “bleed” a bit. Likewise the sky shows some reddish squiggles as well. What stands out most is the relative faintness of all the colors, which makes the whole just a delicate color blend.
Designed by Sir Joseph Paxton to house the Great Exhibition of 1851, it consisted entirely of cast-iron and plate glass. Its innovative quality lay in its being composed of modular sections made to fit together so that they could be manufactured elsewhere and then brought to Hyde Park where they were quickly combined to form an enormous structure. Any rain that might fall on the structure was easily channeled into gutter patterns within the cast-iron frame so that it could quickly run off. Meanwhile, the glass allowed sunlight to pass through everywhere so that exhibits had no need of any other illumination. And, to prevent overheating, open spaces at various places in the structure helped to provide ample ventilation.
