Abstract
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s (1828–1882) watercolours posed for John Ruskin (1819–1900) a test case for the validity of his responses to colour. Was colour, as eighteenth-century English philosophers argued, secondary to form, suspect for its sensual appeal? Or was it, as Ruskin had proposed in the second volume of Modern Painters, part of a typological language signifying redemptive love? His excitement over colour in the Old Masters in Italy, and his ambivalence regarding the harshly realistic colours of the English Pre-Raphaelites, changed when he discovered Rossetti’s watercolours of Dante and the Virgin Mary. Rossetti, Ruskin wrote, was the moving genius behind ‘the sternly materialistic, though deeply reverent, veracity, with which alone, of all schools of painters, this brotherhood of Englishmen has conceived the circumstances of the life of Christ’. Rossetti’s colour led Ruskin, almost despite himself, to accept colour as a moral and emotional force in the sacra conversazioni of old and new art.
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Notes
- 1.
Harold I. Shapiro, ed., Ruskin in Italy: Letters to His Parents 1845 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 67–68.
- 2.
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 (xxxiii.287–288).
- 3.
On the long history of debates over the value and meaning of colour, see John Gage, Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) and Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). On the history of hostility to colour (especially in England), see also David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion, 2000). For a fuller discussion of these issues, see Elizabeth Helsinger, Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 87–109.
- 4.
See Elizabeth Helsinger, ‘Ruskin and the Aesthetics of Color’, Nineteenth-Century Prose 35.1 (Spring 2008), pp. 13–36 for a fuller discussion of both these passages.
- 5.
Shapiro, ed., Ruskin in Italy (1972), p. 210.
- 6.
See George P. Landow, The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), esp. pp. 110–146 and pp. 329–356.
- 7.
Ibid., also Michael Wheeler, Ruskin’s God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), and C. Stephen Finley, Nature’s Covenant: Figures of Landscape in Ruskin (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992).
- 8.
Shapiro, Ruskin in Italy (1972), p. 144.
- 9.
On Ruskin’s theories and responses to colour in the context of nineteenth-century thinking on this subject, see also Helsinger, ‘Ruskin and the Aesthetics of Color’ and Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts, esp. pp. 87–118. For more on Ruskin’s work in relation to his evolving religious views, see Derek Leon, Ruskin: The Great Victorian (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon, 1969); Robert Hewison, Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976); Elizabeth Helsinger, Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); Tim Hilton, John Ruskin: The Early Years, 1819–1859 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985); Finley, Nature’s Covenant (1992); and Wheeler, Ruskin’s God (1999).
- 10.
For Ruskin’s excited response to Rossetti in 1853, see William E. Fredeman, ed., The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Formative Years, 1835–1862, 2 Vols. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002), Vol. 1, pp. 335–336.
- 11.
Fredeman, ed., Correspondence of Rossetti (2002), Vol. 1, p. 243.
- 12.
Ibid., p. 335.
- 13.
See Hilton, John Ruskin: The Early Years (1985), pp. 209–210, and Leon, Ruskin: The Great Victorian (1969), p. 220. On Ruskin’s friendship with Rossetti, see also Elizabeth Helsinger, ‘Pre-Raphaelite Intimacy: Ruskin and Rossetti’, in Ruskin’s Artists, ed. Robert Hewison (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 85–109.
- 14.
For a useful survey of Victorian reactions to the distorted working-class bodies and facial expressions in Hunt’s and Millais’ early pictures, see J. B. Bullen, ‘The Ugliness of Early Pre-Raphaelitism’, in The Pre-Raphaelite Body: Fear and Desire in Painting, Poetry, and Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 6–48. As Bullen does not remark but many of his quotations make clear, critics also objected to their harsh colours. On their techniques of juxtaposing pure colours, and on their willingness to experiment with new chemical pigments, see Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 148–152.
- 15.
Fredeman, ed., Correspondence of Rossetti (2002), Vol. 1, p. 84.
- 16.
Rossetti in Jerome McGann, ed., Collected Poetry and Prose of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 345.
- 17.
On the genre of the sacra conversazione, see Rona Goffen, ‘Nostra Conversatio in Caelis Est: Observations on the Sacra Conversazione in the Trecento’, The Art Bulletin 61.2 (June 1979), pp. 198–222.
- 18.
George Eliot, Adam Bede (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 177.
- 19.
Ibid.
- 20.
Erin Nerstad, ‘George Eliot’s Evangelical Insight: Close Contact and Realizing Views’, Victorian Literature and Culture 45.3 (September 2017), p. 572.
- 21.
Ibid., p. 573, from William Wilberforce, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes in This Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. 2nd ed. (London: T. Cadell, Jr., and W. Davies, 1797), pp. 102–103.
- 22.
Ibid., p. 180.
- 23.
Erin Nerstad, ‘Decomposing but to Recompose: Browning, Biblical Hermeneutics, and the Dramatic Monologue’, Victorian Poetry 50.4 (Winter 2012), pp. 543–561.
- 24.
Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Writings, ed. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), p. 24.
- 25.
Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book, ed. Thomas J. Collins and Richard D. Altick (Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 2001), pp. 520–523; emphasis added.
- 26.
See William Michael Rossetti, ed., The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London: Ellis, 1911), p. 167n.
- 27.
See George P. Landow, Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows: Biblical Typology in Literature, Art, and Thought (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), Chapter 4 ‘Typology in the Visual Arts’, pp. 119–142.
- 28.
Another account suggests that the central panel would have been The Passover in the Holy Family, a design sketched c. 1855 which much impressed Ruskin. See The Rossetti Archive, ed. Jerome J. McGann, http://www.rossettiarchive.org/, last accessed May 2022; see Scholarly Commentary: Production History for Mary in the House of St. John.
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Helsinger, E. (2023). Ruskin, Rossetti, and the Sacra Conversazione of Colour. 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_6
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