Bernardino Luini, Saint Catherine and Saint Agatha, Chiesa di San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore, Milan.
John Ruskin’s hostility towards Renaissance culture is well known. Denunciation of its pomp, scientism, and “enervated sensuality” gave moral urgency to the analysis of architecture in The Stones of Venice (1851-53), for instance, with its overwhelming narrative of social and spiritual decline. But when it came to the painting of Renaissance Italy, Ruskin found himself again and again of two minds. “Crushed to earth” by the achievements of several crucial artists—Tintoretto, Veronese, Titian (sometimes) in the 1840s and 50s; Botticelli, Carpaccio, and Bernardino Luini later in life—Ruskin couldn’t help but respond to their visionary force. This lecture explores key episodes in the critic’s developing conception of Renaissance painting: moments in which Ruskin had the courage to trust his own aesthetic responsiveness, despite the misgivings expressed in his historical accounts. It does so in the hope of opening up our understanding of Ruskin’s attentiveness to works of visual representation, as staged in his writings and drawings, and of how that exemplary attentiveness might continue to inform our own.
Jeremy Melius is a historian of modern art and criticism who has published widely on figures such as John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Pablo Picasso, and Lee Bontecou. He is completing a book entitled The Invention of Botticelli and at work on another concerning Ruskin and the historical study of art. Currently a NOMIS Fellow at eikones – Center for the Theory and History of the Image, University of Basel, in January 2024 he begins a new role as lecturer in History of Art at the University of York.