Abstract
The editors introduce Ruskin’s religious imagination in the compelling terms of a ‘still, small voice’, raised in praise. In this, the collectively vibrant contributions of Pre-Raphaelites both close to Ruskin and those later inspired by his writings are sacre conversazioni: paintings, stained glass, engraving, relief sculpture, and daguerreotypes, all speak a language of buoyant visual theology. The editors argue that this language is richly Scriptural and poetic, and its Christian charge may illuminate modern concerns of ecology, beauty, theophany, preservation, and even social reform in dynamic ways. As such, the contributors whom the editors introduce in turn, are shown to hold new and extended conversations, drawing faith and aesthetics into dialogue with new ways of seeing and thinking.
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Notes
- 1.
Ruskin cites two paintings: the second is Bellini’s Madonna of the Frari (1488, Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice).
John Ruskin, The Complete Works of John Ruskin, Library Edition, edited by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903–1912), Vol. 35, p. 296. All other references are to the Library Edition and are given by volume and page number in the text, for example (xviii.492–493). In this instance, the relevant footnote is (xxii.83).
- 2.
John Steer, A Concise History of Venetian Painting (London: Thames and Hudson, 1970), p. 62.
- 3.
Richard Hughes Gibson and James Edward Beitler III, Charitable Writing: Cultivating Virtue Through Our Words (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2020), p. 1.
- 4.
William Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood Two Vols (New York, USA: Macmillan, 1905), Vol. I, pp. 260–261.
- 5.
In this sense a broader consideration of the religious imagination and the sacred could certainly open onto wider visual cultures and other religions: indeed, they are not entirely excluded from this book as we see with, for example, the designs of Mary Watts (1849–1938). With Ruskin, however, our book seeks to deepen the understanding of a specifically Western tradition of picture-making, and our focus is on sacre conversazioni as a particular visual expression of the Christian religious imagination.
- 6.
Visual Theology II’s international conference ‘Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites: Sacre Conversazioni’ was held 21–22 September 2019 at Marlborough College, Wiltshire. Details of the programme, and of Visual Theology’s aims, can be found at https://www.visualtheology.org.uk/conferences.
- 7.
See https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/ruskin/empi/notes/hcookwed01.htm, accessed June 2022.
- 8.
The Working Men’s College is one of the oldest extant adult education establishments. It was established in Camden, London, by Christian Socialists in 1854 and was supported by various Victorian notables: Ruskin was particularly involved, as was Dante Gabriel Rossetti—particularly in the drawing classes there. Rossetti had been teaching at the College the night his wife, Elizabeth Siddal (1829–1862), died. See Virginia Surtees, Rossetti’s Portraits of Elizabeth Siddal: A Catalogue of the Drawings and Watercolours (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1991), pp. 10–11.
- 9.
Ruskin is often described as a prophet, both in passing and more seriously. Studies assigning him this role include W. G. Collingwood, The Life and Work of John Ruskin (Boston and New York: Riverside Press, 1893), John T. Middlemiss, A Modern Prophet and His Message: John Ruskin (Sunderland: Smith and Taylor, 1896), and J. Howard Whitehouse, ed., Ruskin the Prophet and Other Centenary Studies (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1920).
- 10.
Francis O’Gorman, ed., The Cambridge Companion to John Ruskin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2015), p. 2.
- 11.
The nature of Ruskin’s contradiction is mentioned by Cook and Wedderburn, for example, in (iii.25) and it is a word that Ruskin frequently uses. He sought to take in ‘both sides at once’, knowing that contradictions could arise, but he deemed it necessary while attempting to come to a firmer conclusion about the matter at hand.
- 12.
Ruskin rearranged his texts, as part of his concern to remove his own contradictions: ‘while the parts of the text which needed contradiction, or correction, have been dealt with as they occurred, in notes distinguished from the old ones by being placed within marks of parenthesis’ (iv.3).
- 13.
Tim Hilton, John Ruskin: The Early Years, 1819–1859 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), documents much of Ruskin’s family’s religious side, particularly their churchgoing in South London during the 1830s and 1840s.
- 14.
Hunt laments these criticisms by Ruskin in his memoirs. See Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism (1905), Vol. I, p. 254.
- 15.
Hunt maintained his friendship with Ruskin and visited him during his later frail days, at his home in Brantwood, Cumbria. There are photos in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London, showing them together there. For further details on the correspondence between Hunt and Ruskin, see George P. Landow ed., ‘“Your Good Influence on Me”: The Correspondence of John Ruskin and William Holman Hunt’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library, 59 (1976–1977), pp. 95–126, 367–396.
- 16.
Michael Wheeler, Ruskin’s God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 14. See also Osborn T. Smallwood, ‘John Ruskin and the Oxford Movement’, CLA Journal 3:2, (December 1959), pp. 114–118, for further detail about Ruskin and Tractarianism.
- 17.
Thomas Carlyle, ‘Signs of the Times’, Edinburgh Review 49 (June 1829), p. 441.
- 18.
Matthew Arnold, St. Paul and Protestantism: With an Essay on Puritanism & the Church of England; and Last Essays on Church & Religion (London: Smith and Elder, 1870), p.viii.
- 19.
Carlyle was well-versed in German intellectual culture, including biblical criticism, where the ideas of historical-critical analysis grew from the studies of Johann Gottfried Eichhorn in the eighteenth century. Later research from the Tübingen School was to include David Friedrich Strauss’ groundbreaking The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, translated into English by George Eliot in 1846.
- 20.
George P. Landow, The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 243.
- 21.
Michael Rectenwald, Nineteenth Century British Secularism, Science, Religion, and Literature, Histories of the Sacred and Secular 1700–2000 (New York: Palgrave and Macmillan, 2016), p. 17.
- 22.
The ‘unconversion’ is mentioned variously in other writings and in different ways, for example, Praeterita (1885) and Fors Clavigera (1871).
- 23.
Andrew Tate, ‘“Sweeter Also Than Honey”: John Ruskin and the Psalms’, The Yearbook of English Studies 39:1/2, Literature and Religion (2009), pp. 114–125. See also Andrew Tate, ‘“Archangel” Veronese: Ruskin as Protestant Spectator’, in Robert Hewison, ed., Ruskin’s Artists (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2000), pp. 131–145.
- 24.
David Anthony Downes, Ruskin’s Landscape of Beatitude (California: California State University, 1980). Others, such as Michael Wheeler, suggest that doubt itself, as displayed by the likes of Ruskin, is an unveiling of the ‘agnostic liberalism of the twentieth-century mind’ rather than part of a decidedly antagonistic march towards modern secularism. Wheeler, Ruskin’s God (2006), p.xiv.
- 25.
Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism (1905), Vol. I, p. 191.
- 26.
Stephen Cheeke, Transfiguration: The Religion of Art in Nineteenth-Century Literature Before Aestheticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 119.
- 27.
Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism (1905), Vol. 1, p. 90.
- 28.
On first seeing the painting, Ruskin wrote: ‘I never was so utterly crushed to the earth before any human intellect as I was to-day—before Tintoret. [sic] … and then heaven and earth come together’ (v.38). Later, when Ruskin and Hunt serendipitously bumped into each other in Venice in 1869, they decided to visit Scuola Grande di San Rocco to study the painting together. Ibid., p. 73 and p. 90.
- 29.
Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism (1905), Vol. I, p. 90.
- 30.
George P. Landow ed., ‘“Your Good Influence on Me”: The Correspondence of John Ruskin and William Holman Hunt’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library, 59 (1976–1977), pp. 95–126, p. 377.
- 31.
George P. Landow, Replete with Meaning: William Holman Hunt and Typological Symbolism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979) and The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 265–292, and https://victorianweb.org/painting/whh/replete/ruskin.html, accessed June 2022.
- 32.
Christopher Wood, The Pre-Raphaelites (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981), p. 10.
- 33.
Tim Barringer, Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (USA: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 127.
- 34.
Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism (1905), Vol. 1, p. 350.
- 35.
The Scapegoat is demonstrative of Hunt’s missionary zeal; his choice of subject drew directly on Leviticus 16:22 and was designed to encourage people to convert to Christianity. He made two different versions: the preliminary work included a rainbow—a covenantal symbol—whereas in the second version the rainbow is absent. Both Ruskin and Collins defended the work, which was extremely unusual in style and subject, sympathising with its visual power and evangelical ambition.
- 36.
Carole Jacobi, William Holman Hunt, Painter, Painting, Painter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), p. 44.
- 37.
William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters, with a Memoir, Two Vols. (London: Ellis and Elvey, 1895), Vol. 1, p. 114.
- 38.
William Michael Rossetti was inclined to downplay the religious sensibilities of the Pre-Raphaelites in writing that sought to distance them from Ruskinian intention or Church partisanship. For example, in his article The Externals of Sacred Art (1857), he opens with a Ruskin question: ‘How far Fine Art has, in all or any of the ages of the world, been conducive to the religious life?’ but makes it plain that ‘we do not profess to speak of the religious but simply of the “artistic feelings and sympathies” engaged in this question’ (W. M. Rossetti, Fine Art Chiefly Contemporary (London: Macmillan and Co., 1867), p. 41). Elsewhere he attempts to reposition the Brotherhood during the wake of the so-called Papal Aggression of 1850, seeking to dispel the rumour that the Pre-Raphaelites were sympathetic to the Oxford Movement (ibid., p. 152).
- 39.
William Sharp, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Record and a Study (London: Macmillan and Co., 1882), p. 41.
- 40.
John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, first published 1864 (Glasgow: Fontana, 1965), p. 170.
- 41.
Anon, The Edinburgh Review (January, 1874), pp. 63.
- 42.
Rossetti sent this collection of poems including early versions of ‘Ave’ (‘Mater Pulchrae Delectionis’) and ‘The Blessed Damozel’ to William Bell Scott. Ecce Ancilla Domini! (1849–1850) is a visual example of his developing Marianism, highlighting his Art Catholic sensibility. Tellingly, Ecce Ancilla Domini! has the stillness of the Bellini altarpiece: a most holy conversation, but this time between the Archangel Gabriel and the young Virgin Mary prior to the birth of Jesus.
- 43.
- 44.
Clayton and Bell was a British stained glass workshop run by partners John Richard Clayton (1827–1913) and Alfred Bell (1832–1895). The company was founded in 1855 and continued until 1993.
- 45.
Thomas Hall Caine, Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London: Eliot Stock, 1882), pp. 39–40.
- 46.
George P. Landow, Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 19.
- 47.
John Guille Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, President of the Royal Academy Two Vols. (London: Methuen and Co., 1899), Vol. 1, p. 88.
- 48.
Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais (1899), Vol. 1, p. 90. Charles Alston Collins (1828–1873) and Millais were friends from the earliest of days of the Pre-Raphaelites and, as we have seen, attended church together. It was Millais who recommended Collins be allowed to join the Brotherhood, although William Michael objected. He was abstemious, sensitive, and devout, favouring ‘the Puseyite form of faith’ (Rupert Maas, ‘Charles Allston Collins 1828–1873’ (2014), http://www.maasgallery.co.uk/images/PDFs/Collins_small_file_for_email_1.pdf, accessed June 2022). He became increasingly ascetic and is best known for his work Convent Thoughts (1850–1851), which is given due attention in Milbank’s chapter in this volume.
- 49.
Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais (1899), Vol. 1, p. 90, p. 92, p. 109, and p. 112.
- 50.
Ibid., p. 106.
- 51.
Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Art of Pre-Raphaelites (London: Tate Publishing, 2000), pp.xx.
- 52.
For examples of the different press reviews, see Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais (1899), Vol. 1, pp. 74–78.
- 53.
Aside from deploring the characterisation of the Holy Family, Dickens also mocked the Pre-Raphaelites’ choice of name, which had been overlooked by critics the previous year. He guffawed at the ‘Pre-Harvey Brotherhood’, or the ‘Pre-Gower and Pre-Chaucer Brotherhood’ (P.G.A.P.C.B.), failing to notice how they challenged the conventions of the Royal Academicians who signed themselves R.A. See Charles Dickens, ‘Old Lamps for New Ones’ Household Words 1 (15 June 1850), pp. 265–267.
- 54.
Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais (1899), Vol. 1, p. 75.
- 55.
Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais (1899), Vol. 1, p. 204.
- 56.
Ibid., p. 120.
- 57.
John Guille Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, President of the Royal Academy (London: Methuen and Co., 1900), Vol. 2, p. 312, p. 57.
- 58.
Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, Two Vols. (London: Macmillan, 1904), Vol. I, p. 38.
- 59.
Ibid., p. 39.
- 60.
Ibid., p. 59.
- 61.
Mary Lago, ed., Burne-Jones Talking; His Conversations 1895–1898 Preserved by His Studio Assistant Thomas Rooke (John Murray: London, 1982), p. 27.
- 62.
Ibid.
- 63.
Georgiana Burne-Jones, The Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones Vol. 2 (London: Chiswick Press, 1904), p. 325.
- 64.
Lago, Burne-Jones Talking (1982), p. 27.
- 65.
Morris & Co. was reorganised under Morris’ sole direction in 1875. From then onwards, Burne-Jones became the firm’s main figure designer and their commissions—the majority of which were for stained glass—proved to be Burne-Jones’ most regular source of income. Together, the two friends ensured the firm responded to the market for church decoration and developed their distinctive compositions which can still be found throughout churches in the UK, Europe, and the USA.
- 66.
Mary Watts, from Diaries of Mary Seton Watts held at Compton: Watts Gallery Archives [COMWG2008.4, MSW/1-10]: 23 August, 15 April 1893; 23 March 1891.
- 67.
‘Limner’ is Latin for ‘artist’ and ‘leasen’ is an Old English word meaning ‘to glean’.
- 68.
See also Mark Knight and Emma Mason, ed., Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
- 69.
For example, Larsen counters the suggestion that Christianity in the nineteenth century was intellectually weakened by biblical criticism, and instead flips conventional thinking by highlighting greater doubts about doubt than we have previously been given to understand. The premise of the critical understanding of faith in England at this time is one of sustained intellectual rigour and the assumption that faith has to be an ongoing enquiry. See Tim Larsen’s Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 1–18.
- 70.
Quoted in Mason, Christina Rossetti (2018), p. 9.
- 71.
George Pattison, Art, Modernity and Faith (London: SCM Press, 1998), p. 75.
- 72.
Ibid., p. 76.
- 73.
Alister E. McGrath, The Open Secret: A New Vision for Natural Theology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), p. 231; McGrath is quoting from (xxxv.219).
- 74.
Lewis’ Augustinian toned quote is from a paper entitled ‘Is Theology Poetry?’ which was delivered to the Socratic Club at Oxford in 1945. C. S. Lewis, ‘Is Theology Poetry?’ pp. 150–165. Quoted in Paul Brazier ed., C. S. Lewis Revelation, Conversion, and Apologetics (Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2012), p. 115.
- 75.
Jesse Oak Taylor, ‘Storm-Clouds on the Horizon: John Ruskin and the Emergence of Anthropogenic Climate Change’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, Vol. 26 (2018).
- 76.
See also Emma Mason, Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 71.
- 77.
Ibid. Another important study of poetry is Kirstie Blair’s Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), where she examines the bitter wranglings, by different denominations, over acceptable forms of worship, and the influence of the literary arts on ecclesiastical settings.
- 78.
Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism (1905), Vol. 1, pp. 90–91.
- 79.
We commend: Suzanne Fagence Cooper’s, To See Clearly: Why Ruskin Matters (2019); Lucy Hartley’s Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2019); Alison Milbank’s God & the Gothic (2018); Lucy Ella Rose’s Suffragist Artists (2017); Elizabeth Helsinger’s Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts (2008) and her John Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder (1982).
- 80.
Charles Taylor deals with the repositioning and removal of religion within public spaces in his A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). See also Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). Secularisation or at least elements of it as a theory have also been challenged in Callum G. Brown’s The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800–2000 (London: Routledge, 2001).
- 81.
See James Hodkinson and Silke Horstkotte, ‘Introducing the Postsecular: From Conceptual Beginnings to Cultural Theory’, Poetics Today 41:3 (2020), pp. 317–326. The writing of Peter Berger is also particularly interesting in this regard; see ed., The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1999) and The Many Altars of Modernity: Toward a Paradigm for Religion in a Pluralist Age (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014).
- 82.
See Sheona Beaumont and Madeleine Emerald Thiele, ed., Transforming Christian Thought in the Visual Arts Theology, Aesthetics, and Practice (London: Routledge, 2021).
- 83.
T. J. Clark, Heaven on Earth (London: Thames and Hudson, 2018), p. 22.
- 84.
David Morgan, The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Morgan’s research exemplifies a more sociological enquiry into religion in art and material culture, though his conversation with broader philosophical currents is also reflected in James Elkins and David Morgan, eds., Re-Enchantment (London: Routledge, 2009).
- 85.
Ibid., p. 76.
- 86.
O’Gorman, ed., The Cambridge Companion to John Ruskin (2015), p. 13.
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Beaumont, S., Thiele, M.E. (2023). Introduction: ‘All Great Art Is Praise’ John Ruskin. In: Beaumont, S., Thiele, M.E. (eds) John Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites, and Religious Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21554-4_1
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