Word: ruskinism
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...seemed not to be entangled in false ideals and academic systems. Their bywords were purge, simplify, archaize. Like all true cultural revolutionaries, they were conservatives at heart, and they were lucky in having as their megaphone and mentor the greatest art critic ever to use the English language: John Ruskin...
...Victorian thought: science and religion. Their objections to the popular English art of their time rested, in fact, on both. They were permeated with the belief that nature was the fingerprint of its creator and that studying it was the best way to acquaint oneself with his designs. Ruskin had inveighed against the "unhappy prettiness and sameness" of established English painting, "which cannot but be revolting to any man who has his eyes, even for a measure, open to the divinity of the immortal seal on the common features that he meets in the highways and hedges hourly and momentarily...
...veins of an elecampane leaf, in the grain of stone or the purling of a brook. That is why the details of Pre-Raphaelite landscape, ostensibly the fruit of candid observation, take on such a hortatory, didactic air. One knows, looking at Millais's portrait of Ruskin in his sober frock coat on the rocky verge of a Scots cascade, that every wrinkle of the gray gneissic crag he stands on is meant to speak of the geological span of the creation and to imply a sense of time at the opposite extreme to the rapid movement...
Little of the information about these literary celebrities will be new to students of Victorian letters. But Rose's anecdotes and insights provide a fresh view of the circumstances that bedeviled relations between the sexes a century ago. Take the piteous marital saga of John Ruskin, the most famous art critic of the age. On his wedding night, the 29-year-old Ruskin was paralyzed with disgust when confronted with the first naked female body he had ever seen. Promising to consummate the marriage six years hence, Ruskin told his bride Effie Gray that childbirth would ruin her beauty...
...claim that the ancient Greeks had sensed what he had systematized is borne out by eerie resonances. In Aeschylus' drama, Orestes describes a snake "as though human ... its gaping mouth clutching the breast that once fed me ... it then mingled the sweet milk with curds of blood." John Ruskin has a serpent nightmare: "It rose up like a Cobra-with horrible round eyes and had woman's, or at least Medusa's, breasts. [It] fastened on my neck." The origins of tabloid astrology can be traced to the predictions of Astrampsychus (circa A.D. 350): "Gladness of mind...