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Ruskin, John

Ruskin, John (1819-1900), English writer, art critic, and
   reformer, a dominant tastemaker among intellectuals of the
   Victorian period. Ruskin is best known for his monumental studies
   of architecture and its social and historical implications described
   in The Seven Lamps of Architecture and its sequel, The Stones
   of Venice.

   Ruskin was born February 8, 1819, in London and educated at
   the University of Oxford. His youthful passions for art, literature,
   and travel were encouraged by his father, a wealthy merchant.
   The story of his early years was told by Ruskin himself in his last
   work, an unfinished autobiography, Praeterita (1885-1889). His
   main theme, the relationship between art and morality, was first
   set forth, and his influence as aesthete and art critic
   established, with the publication in 1843 of the first volume of his
   Modern Painters. This work was in part a defense of the
   then-controversial painter J. M. W. Turner. The two books that
   followed, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The
   Stones of Venice (1851-1853), were studies in the religious,
   moral, economic, and political significance of domestic
   architecture. Ruskin, renowned for his style, was also an
   effective lecturer. Rebelling against the aesthetically numbing
   and socially debasing effects of the Industrial Revolution, he put
   forth the theory that art, which is essentially spiritual, reached
   its zenith in the Gothic art of the late Middle Ages, which was
   inspired by religious and moral zeal.

   Ruskin became the first Slade Professor of Art at Oxford in 1869,
   remaining in the post until 1879. He was elected to the
   professorship again in 1883 but resigned the next year in protest
   against the practice of vivisection in the university laboratories.
   Ruskin, with a family history of mental disturbance, had periodic
   bouts with insanity beginning in about 1870, and remained an
   invalid from 1889 until his death on January 20, 1900, in
   Coniston, Lancashire. His later works include Lectures on
   Architecture and Painting (1854), Lectures on the Political
   Economy of Art (1858), and Fors Clavigera (Club of Fate,
   1871-1884), a series of letters to the workers of Britain that
   influenced socialist reformers for three generations.

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     Última actualización : 15/01/2001
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