SECTION:
The Mountain and Cultural Aesthetic
Clive Wilmer (University of Cambridge)
Mountains in Miniature: The Holistic Thought of John RuskinJohn Ruskin (1819-2000) is best remembered today as an art critic, but that is rather a limited view of him. He is really a holistic thinker, who as a young man chose art as his main vehicle. His first intellectual enthusiasm was geology, inspired by his first sight of the Alps at the age of fourteen and reinforced soon afterwards by his reading of the great Alpine geologist Horace Benedicte de Saussure. The following year, he wrote his first professional publications: two essays on the geology of the Alps that appeared in The Magazine of Natural History. He maintained his interest in the subject throughout his life, collecting geological specimens and writing such books as The Ethics of the Dust (1866) and Deucalion (begun 1875). In his later years, he took issue with post-Darwinian geologists such as Tyndall.
It is therefore no accident that much of his first major work, the five-volume Modern Painters (1843-60) is devoted to mountains and the structure of the earth, nor that the main hero of the book is J.M.W. Turner, perhaps the greatest painter of mountains in the western canon. It is equally significant that when Ruskin turned as a critic from painting to architecture, his subject was Gothic building, in which it was possible to notice the `look of mountain brotherhood between the cathedral and the Alp'. I am quoting from his most important book on architecture, significantly entitled The Stones of Venice (1851-53), for when Ruskin writes on building he is as much concerned with the medium as its use. Even when, in the second half of his life, he turned from art to social criticism, he reflected on the way communities live and develop in the shadow of mountain ranges.
A stone, Ruskin once wrote, is 'a mountain in miniature'. It will be the purpose of this paper to demonstrate how that conviction is exemplified in his writings..
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