Gothic and Anti-Gothic in Ruskin’s Florentine Renaissance

• In Event: The Gothic Present and Renaissance Art II

Abstract

No historiography of the Gothic can avoid the writings of John Ruskin. And yet, the traditional focus on The Stones of Venice (1851–53), with its unbridled hostility towards Renaissance culture, has prevented scholars from seeing an increasingly complex sense that Ruskin’s Gothic took on in later accounts of Renaissance art during the 1870s. There, Ruskin explored more nuanced relations between the classical and the Gothic that, in his revised conception, came to constitute the leading edge of early Renaissance art itself. The work of key quattrocento painters such as Botticelli, he suggested, embodied the ceaseless dialectical tension between “Greek” qualities of “motion,” “indifference,” and “fleshiness” and the uncanny, anachronistic persistence of a “Gothic” marked by “quietness,” “passion,” and “hungry wasting of the self-forgetful body.” The paper explores the stylistic and temporal complexity of such tensions, as well as their continued relevance in conceiving of a Gothic present within Renaissance art.

Author

• Jeremy Melius, Tufts University