Abstract
This essay offers a new reading of John Ruskin’s pairing of Giorgione and J.M.W. Turner in ‘The Two Boyhoods’, perhaps the most famous chapter of Modern Painters, volume 5 (1860). Ruskin’s text set out an influential account of how artists come to be shaped by their social and material environments. Critics have tended to focus, understandably, on Ruskin’s vivid account of Turner’s formation within the dirt, misery, and deathliness of modern English life. But what happens if we also take Giorgione’s presence here more seriously, and not simply as a rhetorical foil? What re-articulations of artistic vision and environmental receptivity might come into view? The linking of Turner to Giorgione takes place within a long non-isomorphic sequence of doublings that structures the last section of Modern Painters—‘Dürer and Salvator’, ‘Claude and Poussin’, ‘Rubens and Cuyp’, ‘Wouvermans and Angelico’. They conform neither to the parameters of a Pugin-style 'contrast' nor a programmatic historical-stylistic comparison. Rather, following William Empson’s understanding of the ‘double plot’ of ‘pastoral’ thought, the essay explores Ruskin’s experimentation with more speculative forms of correlation, and with the writing of emphatically non-progressive forms of art history. In doing so, it hopes to suggest the lineaments of another kind of art history within the critic’s text, as it begins to surface in his binocular vision of historical worlds.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Oxford Art Journal |
| Publication status | Accepted/In press - 13 Jan 2025 |