Sensory Perception, History and Geology

William Molyneux's question to John Locke about whether a blind man restored to sight could name the difference between a cube and a sphere without touching them shaped fundamental conflicts in philosophy, theology and science between empirical and idealist answers that are radically alien to current ways of seeing and feeling but were born of colonizing ambitions whose devastating genocidal and ecocidal consequences intensify today. This Element demonstrates how landscape paintings of unfamiliar terrains required historical and geological subject matter to supply tactile associations for empirical recognition of space, whereas idealism conferred unmediated but no less coercive sensory access. Close visual and verbal analysis using photographs of pictorial sites trace vividly different responses to the question, from those of William Hazlitt and John Ruskin in Britain to those of nineteenth-century authors and artists in the United States and Australia, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Cole, William Haseltine, Fitz Henry Lane and Eugene von Guérard.

The Byzantine Revival in Europe

The nineteenth-century interest in Byzantium was essentially a romantic revival following the Gothic revival, triggered by the imagination of Ludwig I of Bavaria and his passion for the Byzantine architecture of Italy. His acquisitional taste was taken up by his brother-in-law, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, in socio-political terms, and by Ludwig II on aesthetic terms. French interest in Byzantium was archaeological, connected to what was called Byzantine or Romanesque building in southwest France. Britain’s contribution was highly individualistic, depending on a small number of strong-minded characters who were willing to challenge the prevailing Gothic orthodoxies. Strengthened first by John Ruskin and then by William Morris, it shifted attention away from the “primitive” simplicity of Byzantine work to its simple majesty.

Atmospheric Late Romanticism: Babbage, Marx, Ruskin

One way of describing late Romanticism involves looking at how Romanticism ended. Here, I examine a cluster of epistemological breaks that occurred at the end of the 1830s, and which concerned computers, communism and climate change. As three things that have happened to us but not to the Romantics, these can be recognised as determinate indications of our defining post-Romanticism. I show how ideas, tropes and figures of atmospheric Romanticism were repurposed and transformed in each of these three cases to inspire radically different currents of thought. With Charles Babbage, atmosphere became a computational platform for moral theology; with Karl Marx, it became an epistemological material of social revolution; and with John Ruskin, it became a global infrastructure of scientific self-knowledge. In each case, the break paradoxically involved a formalisation of a Romantic principle: that a description of an atmosphere is also a self-description.

Nooks and Crannies in Visible Cities: 3D Re-imagining Techniques for Archaeology and Architecture in Film

With the success of the BBC and PBS series such as Italy’s Invisible Cities (2017), Ancient Invisible Cities (2018), and Pompeii: New Secrets Revealed (2016), made in collaboration with ScanLab and employing LiDAR scanning and 3D imaging techniques extensively, popular television programmes grasped the aesthetics of spectral 3D mapping. Visualizing urban topographies previously hidden away from view, these shows put on display technological prowess as means to explore veritably ancient vistas. This article sets out to investigate cinematographic devices and strategies – oscillating between perspectives on built heritage championed by two figures central to the 19th-century discourse on architecture: Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and John Ruskin – manipulating the image in a rivalry for the fullest immersion into a traversable facsimile of past spatialities.

Los valores del ornamento entre Ruskin y Le Corbusier: transformaciones bajo la luz de un "nuevo espíritu"

<p>Con la muerte en 1900 de John Ruskin desaparecía un intelectual multifacético cuya vida estuvo entregada a la teoría y a la crítica artística. Antitéticos en muchas cuestiones y parangonables en cuanto al alcance, las contradicciones y al humanismo de sus obras, en este artículo perseguimos la huella de la teoría ruskiniana sobre la dimensión artística del ornamento, a través de algunas obras de Le Corbusier. A partir de los preceptos ruskinianos en esta cuestión, distinguimos en los años de formación del arquitecto suizo, una fuerte impronta de los valores del pintoresquismo y de la experiencia visual romántica de las artes, que irá abandonando conforme adquiera confianza en la industrialización, las nuevas técnicas constructivas y la depuración formal. Una vez instalado en París, y tras publicar sus ideas más revolucionarias, Le Corbusier volverá, en 1925, al mundo de las artes decorativas en el que se formó. Decidido a convencer de lo prescindible del ornamento, la influencia de Ruskin se percibe transformada en su “nuevo espíritu” como un guía que alienta a respetar el conocimiento del pasado, la poesía presente en la luz y la naturaleza, y el valor de la emoción en la arquitectura.</p>

FROM DEAD END TO CENTRAL CITY OF THE WORLD: (RE)LOCATING ROME ON RUSKIN'S MAP OF EUROPE

The habit of observing and recording carefully, in words and in drawing, the works of God in nature and of man in art made travel essential to the process of continual rediscovery which characterizes the work of John Ruskin, causing him to repeatedly redraw his map of Europe. In 1840–1, the young man's Evangelical upbringing and antipathy for the classical inhibited his response to Rome, which remained peripheral to the monumental volumes of the mid-century. Shifting religious views and studies of ancient myth prepared the way for two revelatory visits to Rome in the early 1870s. In Oxford lectures, Ruskin read in Botticelli's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel syntheses of oppositions between schools of art, between the natural and the spiritual, Greek and Christian cultures, Catholic faith and Reforming energies. He also came to feel the ‘power of the place’ in holy places of early Christianity and in continuities of peasant life. Rome is therefore relocated as ‘the central city of the world’, but modern realities menaced this vision. What had been an impoverished backwater was undergoing massive redevelopment and industrialization as the capital of a newly unified state with international ambitions. From these changes, commented on in his monthly pamphlet, Fors Clavigera, Ruskin extracted severe lessons for Victorian Britain. This article is about the ways in which the two types of change interact.