BLACK ARTS, RUINED CATHEDRALS, AND THE GRAVE IN ENGRAVING: RUSKIN AND THE FATAL EXCESS OF ART

BLACK ARTS, RUINED CATHEDRALS,AND THE GRAVE IN ENGRAVING:RUSKIN AND THE FATAL EXCESS

OF ART

By Jonah Siegel

I. The Ruined Cathedral

TO SPEAK ABOUT JOHN RUSKIN’S anxious ~gures for engraved reproduction is to speakabout his troubled relationship to a modernity in which excess and impermanence presentcomplex and interrelated challenges. The ruined cathedral in my title occurs in lecturesRuskin delivered in 1857, and published the same year as The Political Economy of Art.Invited to speak at Manchester on the occasion of the Art-Treasures Exhibition, at theheight of his fame as a critic, Ruskin responded to the moment with two lectures chal-lenging much that the exhibition stood for. He offered the following apocalyptic descrip-tion of the situation of art away from the self-congratulating festival. It is worthconsidering this passage — at once about art and about the responsibility for its blighting— in relation to the immense temporary structure built to house the Art-TreasuresExhibition (Figure 9):

The walls and the ways would have stood — it is we who have left not one stone upon another,and restored its pathlessness to the desert; the great cathedrals of old religion would havestood — it is we who have dashed down the carved work with axes and hammers, and bid themountain-grass bloom upon the pavement, and the sea-winds chaunt in the galleries. (Ruskin16: 65)

It may seem that Ruskin is overstepping a little, that his audience of industrialists andmerchants of the British Midlands, whatever their faults, are hardly to blame for thepathlessness of the desert, the sea-winds blowing through ruined cathedrals. And yet,there are speci~c ways in which the responsibility of the public of Manchester towardsdecayed and decaying works of art is more than fanciful. At this locus of indigestibleaccumulation and the self-satis~ed love of art, Ruskin launches an uncomprising attack onaccumulation itself and the network of ideologies and assumptions supporting it. Some-thing in this temporary palace of art makes Ruskin think about other palaces never meant

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Victorian Literature and Culture (1999), 395–417. Printed in the United States of America.Copyright © 1999 Cambridge University Press. 1060-1503/99 $9.50

for impermanence but reduced to that condition. The Art-Treasures Exhibition, assem-bling as it did an extraordinarily large collection of work and as impressively massive anaudience, was an ideal place for Ruskin to draw attention to the threat presented byplenitude (Figure 10). He shares with the organizers of the exhibition the desire to makeart more widely accessible, but the pressure resulting from a thronging audience as well asfrom the accumulation of art itself inspires a fear of losing value in quantity. Season ticketswere sold in order to allow repeated visits and a train line was built to bring visitors as nearas possible, but it was widely acknowledged that the exhibit in itself was impossible toabsorb in its entirety.1 The account of a contemporary attempts to convey the overwhelm-ing volume:

one can study there all the arts of design from their beginnings to the present: painting,engravings numismatics, goldsmith work, damascening, ceramics, delicate carving, ~necabinetmaking, inlaying, the art of enameling pottery, of doing repoussé work with metals, ofcutting crystals. . . . Imagine a palace all of glass, in which would be found gathered the greatgallery of the Louvre, the Cluny Museum, the cabinet des Médailles, the reserve deposits ofthe Cabinet d’Estampes. . . . — and you will still have only an imperfect idea of this exhibition.(Charles Blanc, Revue des Deux Mondes [Oct. 17, 1857], qtd. in Holt 171)

Figure 9. “The Art-Treasures Exhibition Building. Manchester: Exterior.” Wood engraving,from Illustrated London News (May 2, 1857).

396 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Ruskin gave the remarks he delivered at the Exhibition two titles: “The PoliticalEconomy of Art” became, on its reissue in 1880, “A Joy Forever (and its price on themarket).” The titles taken together (and including parenthesis) suggest what is remark-able in Ruskin’s response to the event which was the immediate stimulus of his talks.He himself identi~ed these lectures as the beginning of the second part of his career,when he turned most fully towards social questions (“political economy”). But the themeof right management which he develops is also directly engaged with the issues urgentlysuggested by the event which was the occasion for his remarks, speci~cally, with how artmight be usefully administered when it is seen as a stream of goods needing conceptualorganization.2

The new title Ruskin gave his lectures more than twenty years later — “A JoyForever” — represents his desire to reiterate the importance of their original context. The~rst line of Endymion (“A thing of beauty is a joy forever”) had been engraved on theprincipal archway over the entrance to the exhibition. Ruskin is concerned enough withthis circumstance to draw attention to it many years later in the opening to the Preface ofthe 1880 reissue of the lectures; he makes clear that a kind of ironic contextualization isthe very purpose that the new title serves:

The title of this book, — or, more accurately, of its subjects, . . . will be, perhaps, recognizedby some as the last clause of the line chosen from Keats by the good folks of Manchester, to

Figure 10. “The Manchester Art-Treasures Exhibition. The Grand Hall.” Wood engraving,from Illustrated London News (May 9, 1857).

Ruskin and the Fatal Excess of Art 397

be written in letters of gold on the cornice, or Holyrood, of the great Exhibition whichinaugurated the career of so many. (16: 11)

By sending his readers back 23 years, Ruskin invites them to consider the relationshipbetween event and argument. Central to his discussion is the irony of endless time — offorever — crowning the physical manifestation of an impermanent phenomenon, oneperhaps only a vague memory in the reader’s mind at the moment of reading. Typically,Ruskin reads with hyperbolic literalness a phrase probably selected, as he acknowledges,with less thought than he gives it.3 He develops the conceit of unrecognized felicity in orderto adduce one of the principal themes of his talk, the importance of permanence in art:

the motto was chosen with uncomprehended felicity: for there never was, nor can be, anyessential beauty possessed by a work of art, which is not based on the conception of itshonored permanence, and local in_uence, as part of appointed and precious furniture, eitherin the cathedral, the house, or the joyful thoroughfare, of nations which enter their gates withthanksgiving, and their courts with praise. (16: 11)

The question may be asked — why should the collection of Art Treasures in Manches-ter make Ruskin think about ruined cathedrals, as in the quotation with which I open?Why does this lead him to the problem of impermanence? The answer is at once simpleand sophisticated: Ruskin’s theme is the direct relationship between the accumulation ofaesthetic objects and the destruction of the possibility of their enjoyment. The argumentcomes together at the ~gure of the audience; he is talking about the responsibility of thepublic in relation to its aesthetic pleasure or fatigue. In such a context, the importance ofobjective questions such as durability and display is based on analogous subjective effects.

Ruskin responds to the gathering of art at which he has been invited to speak bychallenging his hosts, presenting accumulation as fundamentally dangerous to the appre-ciation of art. The second of the two lectures, “The Accumulation and Distribution ofArt,” develops at length the problems raised by the mammoth ambitions of the Art-Treasures Exhibition. Ruskin’s argument is that the material form of the presentation ofart has a crucial effect on the consciousness receiving it,

the amount of pleasure that you can receive from any great work, depends wholly on thequantity of attention and energy of mind you can bring to bear upon it. . . . If you see thingsof the same kind of equal value very frequently, your reverence for them is infallibly dimin-ished, your powers of attention get gradually wearied, and your interest and enthusiasm wornout; and you cannot in that state bring to any given work the energy necessary to enjoy it. (16:57–58)

The response of an audience to art is shaped by its presentation in a crowded, butdisconnected, jumble. Ruskin anticipates more recent critics when he questions whetherit is better to scatter a small amount of attention over many pictures than it is to focus agreat deal of attention on one:

the question is not a merely arithmetical one of this kind. Your fragments of broken admira-tions will not, when they are put together, make up one whole admiration; two and two, in


this case, do not make four, nor anything like four. Your good picture, or book, or work ofart of any kind, is always in some degree fenced and closed about with dif~culty. (16: 58)

The target of this argument is the weakening of what Benjamin would later call the auraof the art object by the mode of its presentation. Benjamin’s well-known account in “TheWork of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” suggests that a great deal of thepower of art is due to its distance from the audience, the loss of this distance being anintegral part of modernity’s relationship to art. What is not always remarked on — perhapsbecause reproduction seems a more urgent question in the present era — is that hisanalysis of the problem is as much a response to nineteenth-century cultural institutionsas to twentieth-century technology. Like Ruskin, Benjamin includes both reproductionand exhibition in his treatment of the experience of art in modernity. It is exhibition whichprovides the model for the crisis he anticipates from technological reproduction:

A painting has always had an excellent chance to be viewed by one person or by a few. Thesimultaneous contemplation of paintings by a large public, such as developed in the nine-teenth century, is an early symptom of the crisis of painting, a crisis which was by no meansoccasioned exclusively by photography but rather in a relatively independent manner by theappeal of art works to the masses. (236)4

Benjamin ascribes “the contemporary decay of the aura” to a desire for intimacy withthe art object which is part of a fundamental challenge to uniqueness inherent in masssociety. His argument links developments in technology with developments in culture hedeplores, but it does not give precedence to technological change. Instead, Benjaminidenti~es a complex phenomenon whereby “the desire of contemporary masses to bringthings ‘closer’ spatially and humanly” is intimately allied with a drive “toward overcomingthe uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction” (225). Benjamin, likeRuskin, attempts to resist the loss of distance which is facilitated by reproduction andexhibition, to oppose (rather than accept) that “Conquest of Ubiquity” which gives its titleto the essay by Valéry which inspired Benjamin’s own:

the amazing growth of our technologies, the adaptability and precision they have attained, theideas and habits they are creating make it a certainty that profound changes are impendingin the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component, which canno longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by ourmodern knowledge and power. (Valéry 1284)

Valéry’s “ubiquity” is a condition which affects the valuation of all objects, not only thosebeing acted on directly either by reproduction or public inspection. As Benjamin notes,“The situation into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may nottouch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated” (223).The question for Ruskin throughout his career, and increasingly towards the end of thecentury, is whether accumulation and reproduction will become part of the production ofwork, or whether they can only be part — both sign and cause — of chaos and decay.5

To understand the urgency of Ruskin’s attack on a debased experience of art, it isimportant to see it in relation not only to the unique event of the Exhibition, but also to a


far more widespread and related phenomenon: the ubiquity and popularity of engravedreproductions of art, particularly as mediated through the press. Techniques of engravinghad become so much more ef~cient and economical in the nineteenth century that it waspossible to support a vast demand.6 Whereas art lovers in previous centuries had had torely on extremely expensive forms of reproduction which, as a matter of course, con~nedthe experience of reproduced art to a relatively small number of people and limited eventhe repertoire of images available to a comparatively small number, Thomas Bewick’sepochal invention of wood engraving in the early nineteenth century soon led to theproliferation of periodicals which made the image — quite literally — cheap.

The illustrated papers of the nineteenth century not only followed closely develop-ments in the arts, they often included reproductions meant for display. Henry Cole was animportant organizer of the Great Exhibition and involved in the founding of the southKensington Museum that would become the Victoria and Albert, but well before thoseevents, he anticipated from contemporary technological developments effects closelyrelated to that which was aimed at by those structures of exhibition: “The great end of thewhole art of engraving” he notes in 1838, “is to render the spirit and genius of a great artistaccessible to the thousands, or the millions, by embodying them in cheap and portableforms. Wood engraving, professedly the cheapest and most portable of all the repre-sentations of great pictures, excels equally in ful~lling the highest mission of its art . . . ”(“Modern Wood Engraving” London and Westminster Review 29 (1838); qtd. in Fox 7).The Penny Magazine, which blazoned its cheapness in its title, was established by theSociety for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in 1832 with the express aim (as formulatedin the preface to the ~rst volume), “to gratify a proper curiosity, and cultivate an increas-ing taste, by giving representations of the ~nest Works of Art, of Monuments of Antiquity,and of subjects of Natural History, in a style that had been previously considered to belongonly to expensive books.” A footnote in the same volume referring to a print of one of themost famous of these works of art in England, “Christ Delivering the Keys to St. Peter”(Figure 11), from Raphael’s Cartoons at Hampton Court, makes clear the ambitions suchan image satis~es: “The Cartoons,” it notes, “are shown, with the other pictures, tovisitors, upon payment of a fee to the person who goes round the apartment. We hope,when the new National Gallery is ~nished that they will be removed to London, so thatthe public may be delighted and improved by their contemplation without the exaction ofsixpences and shillings” (n.386). The circulation of this journal reached 200,000 in its ~rstyear, a success that was matched by the various periodicals that followed closely on itsheels. As my argument is about the speed of change and the problem of excess, it may beas well to list some of these notable successors. The Penny Magazine was followed byPunch in 1841 and the Illustrated London News in 1842. On the continent, 1843 saw theestablishment of a number of foreign analogues: L’Illustration, Die Illustrierte Zeitung.Throughout the middle of the nineteenth century, the pace of founding of new magazinesdid not slacken; Harper’s Weekly began in 1857, and Cornhill Magazine in 1860. Theproliferation I am trying to illustrate was not simply a matter of variety of journals, but ofnumbers of issues produced; by 1863 the Illustrated London News had reached a circula-tion of 300,000.

That a new era in mass access to the image had arrived was readily evident to writersand others concerned with the diffusion of art. In 1846, an anonymous author declares inthe Art Union, “engraving on wood is destined to do far more for ‘the million’ than it has


yet done; if our artist will aid our wood engravers, they will effect great things for themass” (qtd. in Fox n.9). The Penny Magazine featured regular articles on “The Lives ofRemarkable Painters,” accompanied generally by a portrait of the artist and a reproduc-tion of one of his works, engraved in wood (Figure 12). As Ruskin well understood, therewere close links connecting the popular press, the growth in art exhibitions, and thesupporters of an ever-growing access to reproduced art. Joseph Paxton ~rst sketched outhis design for the Crystal Palace on June 11, 1850; it was published in the IllustratedLondon News on the sixth of July, less than a month after ~rst being conceived. “TheCrystal Palace,” it should be remembered, was a name ~rst given to that structure byPunch. In a wonderful mis-en-abyme acknowledgement of this relationship, in 1851 theIllustrated London News offered its readers an image of the journal being run off, to thefascination of numerous onlookers, on a “Patent Vertical Printing Machine” runningwithin the con~nes of the Crystal Palace itself during the Great Exhibition — the work ofthe illustrated journal becoming both instance and means of diffusing the new ubiquity ofthe printed image (Figure 13). Six years later, the Illustrated London News was deeplyimplicated in the development and promotion of the Art-Treasures Exhibition, recordingin vivid detail the planning, construction, and opening of that event, as well as its receptionby the public.7

Ruskin offers his challenge in the midst of the cheerful exhibitionism of the era,engaging directly with the manifold and interwined celebrations of easy access. It is worth

Figure 11. From Raphael, “Christ delivering the Keys to St. Peter.” Wood engraving, fromPenny Magazine (December 1, 1832).


Figure 12. “Titian, and Group from his Venus and Adonis.” Wood engraving, from PennyMagazine (June 14, 1845).


noting the substance behind Ruskin’s concerns. These prints, from which so much wasexpected, were not only cheaper and readily available, but of a dramatically lower qualitythan the kinds connoisseurs had admired for centuries. Nevertheless, although Ruskin isdisturbed by the decline in quality of these reproductions, his real concern is for thenecessary loss of aura, of deep intense attention, implied by the presence (the omni-pres-ence) of such works in culture.8 His lectures at the Art-Treasures Exhibition gave Ruskinthe opportunity to launch a forceful attack on the values motivating the event, hence therecurrent concern with the danger of cheap prints in A Joy Forever; exhibition andreproduction present a joint challenge to the very love of art they are meant to support.As Benjamin would argue years later, the drive towards exhibitions (“the desire ofcontemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’”) is intimately allied with the ubiquity ofreproduction. Ruskin offers an impassioned but sophisticated analysis of the culturaleffect of the ubiquity of reproduction:

of one thing you may be sure, that art which is produced hastily will also perish hastily; andthat what is cheapest to you now, is likely to be dearest in the end. I am sorry to say, the greattendency of this age is to expend its genius in perishable art of this kind. . . . There is a vastquantity of intellect and labour consumed annually in our cheap illustrated publications; youtriumph in them; and you think it so grand a thing to get so many woodcuts for a penny. Why,

Figure 13. “Patent Vertical Printing Machine. In the Great Exhibition.” Wood engraving,from Illustrated London News (May 31, 1851).


woodcuts, penny and all, are as much lost to you as if you had invested your money ingossamer. More lost, for the gossamer could only tickle your face, and glitter in your eyes; itcould not catch your feet and trip you up: but bad art can, and does; for you can’t like goodwoodcuts as long as you look at the bad ones. If we were at this moment to come across aTitian woodcut, or a Durer woodcut, we should not like it — those of us at least who areaccustomed to the cheap work of the day. We don’t like, and can’t like, that long; but whenwe are tired of one bad cheap thing, we throw it aside and buy another bad cheap thing; andso keep looking at bad things all our lives. (16: 41–42)

Ruskin’s diagnosis is evidently more than a simple complaint about taste; he recognizesthat modernity itself is not satis~ed by the abundance which characterizes it, but is insteaddriven by an inescapable, perpetual disappointment. As the appetite is not ultimatelysatis~able by cheap images, proliferation is the sole answer; perpetual change is the onlyrelief for the jaded sensibility. The analysis has a doubled target; by drawing attention tothe real labor that is expended in the effort to feed the desire for disposable images,Ruskin identi~es the deadening effect of so much cheap art as working in two directions,on the public and on those forced to produce the disposable work that will never quitesatisfy it.

II. The Black Arts

IF RUSKIN is prescient in his analysis of the psychological effects of cheap mass producedart in 1857, thirty years later he is remarkable in his treatment of a problem whichevidently had not gone away, but had only become more urgent. The onslaught of cheapimages did not abate; it rather increased at an astonishing rate — including not onlywood-engravings, but photographs and photogravures. Ruskin’s response to photographyis complex; it was a medium he often used, with pleasure and fascination, to documentbuildings at risk or to bring to England images of central importance to his aesthetic ideals.Nevertheless, he chose a remarkable title for the article on reproduction he published inthe Magazine of Art (1887; published 1888), one which captures precisely the combinationof the real and the ~gurative in his treatment of the topic: “The Black Arts: A Reverie inthe Strand.” The Black Arts is, of course, the term under which are categorized thepractices of magic, or even necromancy. They are black because they are forbidden orhidden. It is just Ruskin’s joke, however, that the arts he has in mind are black becausethey are precisely the contrary of forbidden, and not hidden at all. They are also literallyblack, these arts, because they reduce everything to the black lines of ink which make upthe reproduced image.

The second part of the title, though openly pedestrian, is also important — “AReverie on the Strand.” Reproduction has had a special relation to the city since at leastthe eighteenth century; the representation of print buyers has allowed artists as diverse asRowlandson and Daumier to evoke the forms of attention of a middle-class urban popu-lation.9 Ruskin reminds us of this relationship by the purposefully incongruous juxtaposi-tion of archaic and modern — of black arts mulled over on the busy London street. Thetext of the brief article locates us vividly in the city, along with a wandering Ruskin whopaints himself as a bewildered superannuated _aneûr overwhelmed by the pace of changein the metropolis:


I don’t know London any more, nor where I am in it — except the Strand. In which, walkingup and down the other day, and meditating over its wonderful displays of etchings andengravings and photographs all done to perfection such as I had never thought possible in myyounger days, it became an extremely searching and troublesome question with me what wasto come of all this literally “black art,” and how it was to in_uence the people of our cities.(14: 357–59)

Ruskin identi~es the effect of the black arts with the life of the city — with its changeabil-ity and its accumulation. The uncertain steps of an old man in a burgeoning metropolisbecome emblematic not only of the experience of change, but of its exhausting effect:

What is it all to come to? Are our lives in this kingdom of darkness to be indeed twenty timesas wise and long as they were in the light?

The Answer — what answer was possible to me — came chie_y in the form of fatigue,and a sorrowful longing for an old Prout washed in with Vandyke brown and British ink, oreven a Harding forest scene with all the foliage done in zigzag. (14: 359)

It is not lost on Ruskin that the exhaustion provoked by his walk in this crowded city ofreproduction is a challenge to his career-long celebration not only of art, but of the faithfulreproduction of nature:

No one has pleaded more for ~nish than I in past time, or oftener, or perhaps so strongly,asserted the ~rst principle of Leonardo that a good picture should look like a mirror of thething itself. But now that everybody can mirror the thing itself — at least the black and whiteof it — as easily as he takes his hat off, and then engrave the photograph, and steel the copper,and print piles and piles of the thing by steam, all as good as the ~rst half-dozen proofs usedto be, I begin to wish for a little less to look at. (14: 360)

His treatment of reproduction demonstrates vividly the complexity of Ruskin’s thoughtson the aesthetic experience. His evident awareness of the psychological element in thelove of art is what keeps him from being an unquali~ed supporter of the accumulation ofart — “I begin to wish for a little less to look at.” But Ruskin is disingenuous in suggestingthat this is a new desire; it is one that he has held for a long time. In his inaugural lectureas Slade Professor of Art at Oxford in 1870, Ruskin had presented the problem as arisingfrom what the public in modernity demands of its art:

There is a continually increasing demand for popular art, multipliable by the printing-press,illustrative of daily events, of general literature, and of natural science. Admirable skill, andsome of the best talent of modern times, are occupied in supplying this want; and there is nolimit to the good which may be effected by rightly taking advantage of the powers we nowpossess of placing good and lovely art within the reach of the poorest classes. Much hasalready been accomplished; but great harm has been done also, — ~rst, by forms of artde~nitely addressed to depraved tastes; and, secondly, in a more subtle way, by really beau-tiful and useful engravings which are yet not good enough to retain their in_uence on thepublic mind; — which weary it by redundant quantity of monotonous average excellence, anddiminish or destroy its power of accurate attention to work of a higher order. (20: 26–27)


The Ruskin of “The Black Arts” is not confronting a new challenge, but developingideas underlying such central works in his oeuvre as Stones of Venice and Modern Painters,principal among them, the complete implication of the art of a period in the culture inwhich it arises. Seeing in modernity the triumph not only of mass production, but of themass experience of the image, Ruskin cannot help but identify the inescapable effect ofsuch phenomena on the production of art. Thus, his review of the Royal AcademyExhibition of 1875 ironically returns the art to its source, making the principal artists ofthe day into mere colorists of the illustrated papers, the annual exhibition into a particu-larly colorful edition of a journal:

Before looking at any single picture, let us understand the scope and character of theExhibition as a whole. The Royal Academy of England, in its annual publication [meaningthe exhibition itself], is now nothing more than a large coloured Illustrated Times folded insaloons, — the splendidest May number of the Graphic, shall we call it? (14: 263)10

Yet more contentiously, Ruskin proposes that the productive work of the illustrators mayultimately be more impressive than what he takes to be the feeble colored forms of theExhibition:

Yet observe, in saying that Academy work is now nothing more, virtually, than a cheapcoloured woodcut, I do not mean to depreciate the talent employed in it. Our public press issupported by an ingenuity and skill in rapid art unrivalled in any period of history; nor haveI ever been so humbled, or astonished, by the mightiest work of Tintoret, Turner, or Ve-lasquez, as I was, one afternoon last year, in watching, in the Dudley Gallery, two ordinaryworkmen for a daily newspaper ~nishing their drawings on the blocks by gaslight, againsttime. (14: 264)

In the gaslight and hurry which is the setting of the illustrators’ work, Ruskin evokes thatcharacteristic darkness of their production. These workmen are drawing, cutting, inking,all to produce dark lines in a hurried and penumbral modernity. Hurry is, of course, theother side of impermanence. Those workers rush because the images they illustrate are oftransient value and so must be brought out as soon as possible.

III. The Grave in Engraving

SO FAR, I have presented, in the ruined cathedral and the black arts, two archaic, self-con-sciously gothic images by which Ruskin is able to describe what for him is in fact a verymodern problem, the challenge of the proliferation of the image raised by the develop-ments of new technologies of reproduction. It is paradoxically in a third and yet morelethal ~gure — “the grave in engraving” — that Ruskin offers a form of recuperation(albeit a limited one) of the reproductive image and the techniques of reproduction.

The observation that the root of engraving is the grave comes in lectures Ruskinpublished as Ariadne Florentina (1873–76).11 Delivered at Oxford in 1872, these lecturescontain Ruskin’s most sustained treatment of reproduction. Identifying the grave in en-graving allows Ruskin to speak about three things involved in printmaking: the serious,the deadly, and the carved. In one word, he presents at once the threat and the promise


of the process. Challenging the already-cited boosters of the technology, he declares hisconviction that “engraving, and the study of it, since the development of the modern~nished school, have been ruinous to European knowledge of art” (22: 463). I haveindicated the several interrelated ways in which engraving may be understood as threat-ening: it not only challenges the ability to love art by causing the satiation of the sensibili-ties and fostering the appetite for pointless change, but it deadens the worker who carvesdesigns he had no role in making. Audience and art producer are trapped in a deadeningcycle of mutual unsatis~able need:

In the miserably competitive labour of ~nding new stimulus for the appetite — daily more gross— of this tyrannous mob, we may count as lost, beyond any hope, the artists who are dull, docile,or distressed enough to submit to its demands; and we may count the dull and distressed bymyriads; — and among the docile, many of the best intellects we possess. (22: 470)12

Nevertheless, the grave qualities involved in reproductive technologies are more thansimply lethal; in Ruskin tombs and graves are not only sites of death, they also hold a specialfascination as places of beauty which modernity has forgotten how to love. Sites of burialand their associated memorials are, of course, central to Ruskin’s analyses of art; from thesepulchers of Venetian Doges to the funeral ef~gy of Ilaria del Carretto in Lucca, they recuras the measure of the effectiveness of art in his writing. “[T]he power of all Christian work,”he notes in Val D’ Arno (1874), “begins in the niche of the catacomb and depth of the sar-cophagus, and is to the end de~nable as architecture of the tomb” (23: 25). The conclusion ofa well-known passage in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) is worth citing in this con-text because it contains an interplay between apparently incongruous language and images(sowing, the grave, and time) to which Ruskin recurs in his lectures on engraving:

it is one of the appointed conditions of the labour of men that, in proportion to the timebetween the seed-sowing and the harvest, is the fullness of the fruit; and that generally,therefore, the farther off we place our aim, and the less we desire to be ourselves the witnessesof what we have laboured for, the more wide and rich will be the measure of our success. Mencannot bene~t those that are with them as they can bene~t those who come after them; andof all the pulpits from which human voice is ever sent forth, there is none from which itreaches so far as from the grave. (8: 233)

In Ariadne Florentina, Ruskin recuperates the act of engraving with the audacious claimthat the real essence of this serious art is the scratch, the carving, the en-graving. His playon words is a reminder at once of linguistic and of actual facts; it allows him to proposethat rather than being naturally suited to its current function, engraving itself has beendebased by being made a mere instrument of reproduction. Ruskin carries out anastonishing transvaluation of the medium, turning it from an essentially secondary repro-ductive form to “the ~rst of the arts” (22: 305). His account raises the fundamental act ofengraving, when rightly understood and correctly practiced, to being the precondition, nolonger the simple record, of architecture and sculpture: “engraving, though not altogetherin the method of which you see examples in the print-shops of the High Street, is, a priorart to that either of building or sculpture, and is an inseparable part of both, when theyare rightly practised” (22: 304).


Ruskin focuses on the work of the engraver: not on the making of the copy, but onthe carving of the plate; to engrave, he insists, is to make “the most permanent of furrows.”He repeats this de~nition for emphasis, “a permanent cut or furrow.” It is not lost onRuskin that what he proposes recuperates engraving from its later and more commonmeanings. In his de~nition, it is “essentially the cutting into a solid substance for the sakeof making your ideas as permanent as possible, graven with an iron pen in the Rock forever. Permanence, you observe, is the object, not multiplicability; — that is quite anaccidental, sometimes not even a desirable attribute of engraving” (22: 320). The produc-tive action of cutting is emphasized by repeatedly describing the tool of the trade, thegraver, as “a solid ploughshare,” as though seeds might be sown in the furrow it cuts (22:348). The instrument of engraving, Ruskin notes, whether in metal or wood, “is a solidploughshare, which, instead of throwing the earth aside, throws it up and out, producingat ~rst a simple ravine, or furrow.” (22: 348).

Picking up on the central motivating argument of the “The Nature of Gothic” chapterof Stones of Venice, Ruskin demonstrates that the ever-increasing technical perfection ofengraving is not only pernicious for the consumer, but for the producer as well. I havementioned how in his review of the 1875 Royal Exhibition Ruskin made the paintings ondisplay into illustrated prints (with apologies to the printmakers). In the course of thelectures that became Ariadne Florentina, he held up “Astraea Redux,” a political cartoonby Tenniel taken from a recent issue of Punch (Figure 14). Giving this ephemeral piecethe focused attention generally reserved for the highest art (the close attention to the partthat he has already given the term “engraving”) he ~nds in it passages of real butdangerous achievement. He damningly praises the piece for containing “as high qualitiesas it is possible to ~nd in modern art.” Blending his social and his aesthetic analyses, hefocuses on the rich dark passages in the cartoon, comparing them to those in images froman entirely different kind of work, Holbein’s series The Dance of Death.

Ruskin’s point is complex because he has in his sights not only the artist of the design,but the carver who transferred it onto a wood-block and the reader whose eye passed overthe reproduced image without a thought to the workmanship involved. The reason tofocus on the dark parts of the engraving is that the number of cross-hatchings the artist’spen has made in the course of drawing this entirely ephemeral sketch calls for an uncon-scionable number of precise cuts on the part of the men employed in reproducing it(Figure 15). The repetition of the line itself is as deadening for the worker as the perpetualonslaught of image is for the viewer: “the rapid work, though easy to the artist is verydif~cult to the woodcutter; so that it implies instantly a separation between the two crafts,and that your woodcutter has ceased to be a draughtsman” (22: 356). Holbein, on the otherhand, has kept himself to a limited number of cuts — suggesting the intimate link betweenhis work and that of the craftsman, or that, in fact, he himself was the carver of his owndesign. Ruskin’s analysis will be familiar to any reader of “The Nature of Gothic.” Hecelebrates the variety and roughness which is indicative not of destructive mass produc-tion, but of a craftsman thinking and engaged with his work.

Ruskin recuperates the primacy of engraving and makes it a serious matter, but notfor this reason any less deadly, and this is the reason why the counter-example of Hol-bein’s Dance of Death becomes so important to his argument. “[E]ngraving means, pri-marily, making a permanent cut or furrow in something,” Ruskin notes, before going onto indicate the dif~culty presented by this recovered de~nition: “The central syllable of


Figure 14. John Tenniel, “Astraea Redux!!” Wood engraving, from Punch (November 2,1872).


the word has become a sorrowful one, meaning the most permanent of furrows” (22: 306;my emphasis). In this account, the sorrowful implications of the grave are a moderndevelopment. The fear of the grave, the inability to see it as productive, has been afoundational error of modernity. Ruskin’s lectures function, much like Holbein’s imagesas a kind of memento mori; the attempt to reclaim the value of the graven is closely alliedwith a transvaluation of the power of the grave. That both have become signs of transienceand meaningless consumption is part of his diagnosis of the modern condition. Death as alimit or boundary adding signi~cance to life, the carved line aiming at permanence bymeans of controlled, dif~cult work on hard material (stone, metal, wood) — these areelements that make the recuperation of the grave possible. Modernity responds to imper-manence with reiteration, with the proliferation of disposable reproduced work; Ruskinproposes instead a challenge to impermanence at its base. Ruskin argues that the artisticwork evident in modernity, and the appetite which it whets and leaves unsatis~ed combineinto a death in life to which an actual end might serve as a reprieve rather than a sorrowful~nal surrender. The grave in Ruskin offers rest, rather than constant change, and thepossibility of permanence in memory or tomb.

Holbein’s Dance of Death runs through the lectures like the skeletons run throughthat cycle of engravings, reminding the viewer of death and the importance of under-standing oneself as ever confronted by the possibility of imminent demise. It is worthnoting that these works of German engraved art are not at all in the purview of Ruskin’soriginally-advertised topic, “Sandro Botticelli and the Florentine Schools of Engraving.”He wrenches Holbein’s images into his presentation because of the economical way inwhich they engage his grave theme. Like all memento mori, Holbein’s work calls attentionto the imminence of the grave, and the serious implications of its proximity. Ruskin

Figure 15. John Tenniel, “Astraea Redux!!” (detail of cross-hatching). Wood engraving, fromJohn Ruskin, Ariadne Florentina. The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and AlexanderWedderburn. Library Edition. (London: George Allen, 1906). 22: 359.


introduces the series with two images, whose particular subjects resonate with the themeshe develops in his lecture and which motivate his analysis of reproduction generally. Whathe describes as “two of the best wood engravings ever produced by art” (22: 352) are woodcuts showing death approaching or harassing a priest as he delivers his sermon and deathdriving the oxen which move the plow of a weary farmer (Figures 16 and 17).

As Ruskin’s attempt to celebrate Italian work that he identi~es with a purity andhealthiness of execution now lost is overtaken by grimmer topics, Holbein becomes afar more important ~gure than Botticelli (the artist he wrongly believed to have beenresponsible for most of the prints discussed in Ariadne Florentina). Ruskin identi~es theGerman engraver’s work as deeply responsive to the cultural crisis of the Reformation,and as therefore having far more in common with the desperate moral project of Ruskinhimself than the more con~dent Italian work. Tracing Holbein’s critical sensibility to theeffect of working during a period of spiritual turmoil, Ruskin describes an artist “alwaysmelancholy . . . and entirely furious in his indignation against all who, either by actualinjustice in this life, or by what he holds to be false promise of another, destroy the good,or the energy, of the few days which man has to live” (22: 354). A quotation from Psalms(23. 4) takes on special resonance in the context of Ruskin’s discussion of the engraver:like a critic in modern England, Holbein ~nds himself in deadly darkness, in “the valleyof the shadow of death” (22: 416). But, if it is easy to locate a connection betweenRuskin’s critical aspirations and those he attributes to Holbein, it is no less clear thatRuskin identi~es analogical ~gures for himself within the prints themselves; it is a par-ticular sign of the sophistication of Ruskin’s critical sensibility that he identi~es at oncewith the preacher in Holbein’s engraving and with the death-~gure who approaches him.In a confusing passage of quotation and non-quotation and in a haze of uncertain pro-noun reference, the lecturing Ruskin ventriloquizes the ~gure of Death that has cometo interrupt the preacher: “Death comes quietly: I am going to be preacher now; hereis your own hour-glass, ready for me. You have spoken many words in your day. But‘of the things which you have spoken, this is the sum,’ — your death-warrant, signed andsealed. There’s your text for to-day” (22: 355). With the link between graver and plowwell established, the analogy between the work of the plowman, “pressing the iron intothe ground” is readily identi~able with that of the engraver when rightly understood. InRuskin’s interpretation, death is a comfort and help to this carver. Again, it is good toremember that Ruskin was speaking these remarks, making the pronominal ambiguitya rich one: “‘It is a long ~eld,’ says Death; ‘but we’ll get to the end of it to-day, — youand I’” (22: 355).

Ruskin could not help but be preoccupied with the presentation and diffusion of hisown work. His self-imposed and widely in_uential role was to encourage the knowledgeand admiration of art; and yet, particularly late in his career, as he became ever moreuncomfortable with the nature of publicity and publication, he sought out varied forms inwhich to make his ideas known that might overcome the challenges of more standardmethods. He came to publish his own works, to begin the letter-periodical Fors Clavigera,to concern himself that the creation and distribution of his works should instantiate, andnot only speak of, his values.13 In the grave death-haunted preacher, Ruskin presented tohis own audience a more solemn form of communication than the transient importuningsof a venal mass media. I have noted that an important theme in Ariadne Florentina is thatthe grave — like the graven — need not be a sign of spiritual death. Hence the presenta-


Figure 17. Hans Holbein, Dance of Death, “The Last Furrow.” Facsimile from woodcut, fromJohn Ruskin, Ariadne Florentina. The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and AlexanderWedderburn. Library Edition. (London: George Allen, 1906). 22: facing 352.

Figure 16. Hans Holbein, Dance of Death, “The Two Preachers.” Facsimile from woodcut,from John Ruskin, Ariadne Florentina. The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook andAlexander Wedderburn. Library Edition. (London: George Allen, 1906). 22: facing 352.


tion to his students of the image of the plowman from Holbein — preserved forever,though death mocks him, a cut image of a grave man, cutting a fruitful furrow in fertileearth.

The lectures as a whole will end with two long passages from the Memoir of ThomasBewick (1862), the famed inventor of wood engraving. In the ~rst, Bewick insists onthe importance for social order of landowners who farm their own land. In the second,Bewick describes the virtuous life of his acquaintance, Gilbert Gray, a book-binderwho abandoned his early training for the priesthood in order to devote a life of frugalmodesty to producing “books of an entertaining and moral tendency, printed and cir-culated at a cheap rate” (22: 460). Bewick’s account of this upright man ends with hisfriends accompanying him to his grave. With these extracts Ruskin picks up on theresonant images from Holbein — of priesthood, death, and plowing — that he hadoffered his students early in the lectures. His own ~nal brief paragraph is a simplecomment on the tomb of Gilbert Gray: “And what graving on the sacred cliffs of Egyptever honoured them, as that grass-dimmed furrow does the mounds of our Northernland?” (22: 460).

It is dif~cult to cut hard matter with a sharp implement. Each line requires focus,self-control, and attention; in recuperating the grave in engraving Ruskin proposes thatthe importance of reproductive technology has been misunderstood, that its possiblepower has been trivialized. I have tried to suggest in this paper some of the ways inwhich Ruskin’s apparently fanciful ~gures for the situation of art in modernity have acontent beyond their rhetorical effectiveness. I would emphasize in closing that muchof what is tortuous or elaborately ~gurative in Ruskin can be traced to that complexhistoricizing sensibility which makes it impossible for him not to see himself as impli-cated in the disturbing modernity he was interested in challenging. “It is we who havedashed down the carved work with axes and hammers” he notes in the passage from1857 with which I opened this paper. Ruskin’s ruined cathedral, his black arts, and thegrave in engraving, are so many ways to describe the complex challenge to attentionpresented by a modernity inundated by cheap images. The title of the lectures, AriadneFlorentina, is referred to only once by Ruskin, and only as he suggests his failure todevelop its signi~cance.14 Ariadne’s clue is a thin line of safety with love at one endand danger at the other; its function is not to spare Theseus his trial, but to retrievehim after he has confronted the threat at the heart of the labyrinth. The single line ofthread allows the possibility of egress by recapitulating the challenging form confrontedon the way in; it neither breaks the maze nor maps out the structure in its entirety. Inspite of his protestations of having failed to develop on his title, Ruskin has certainlymade clear the importance of the labyrinthine: that intricate detailed elaboration whichis only clari~ed by careful attention — it is this that the line of engraving reveals, aline that takes the form of the maze in order to serve as the clue which provides ahope of escape. It has become something of a commonplace to refer to Benjamin’saccount of the loss of aura caused by reproduction. Careful attention to the work ofJohn Ruskin may allow, if not the actual recovery of the aura of the original work, atleast a richer form of mourning for its loss. By focusing on the attention of the audienceon the one hand, and on the work of the printmaker on the other, Ruskin makes aplea for dif~culty, for the virtues of the labyrinthine. In this analysis, each impermanentpiece of paper is a sign, not merely of a no-longer valued original, but of the work of


the hand which carved the lines on the surface so that the image could be made. Thekind of attention Ruskin brings to bear allows what can seem merely ephemeral theopportunity to be recognized as grave.

Harvard University

NOTES

1. For recent accounts of an event that was far more important in the history of art than thebetter-known 1851 Great Exhibition, see also Finke, Holt 164–76; Haskell 158–60;Herrmann; and Steegman 229, 233–38. On international attention to the exhibition, see Holt166–67. Herrmann notes that eight weeks after opening, the Exhibition was still attended by9,000 people a day. A good many guides were produced, their titles indicating their role indirecting an intrigued, but often confused, public around the exhibition: What to observe atManchester; a Walk round the Art-Treasures Exhibition, under the guidance of Dr. Waagen;W. Blanchard Jerrold, How to See the Art-Treasures Exhibition; and the anonymous What tosee and where to see it! or the Operatives Guide to the Art-Treasures Exhibition. Severalcontemporary accounts of the exhibition exist, among them, The Art-Treasures Examiner: APictorial, Critical and Historical Record of the Art-Treasures Exhibition at Manchester in 1857is a particularly useful resource. An interesting contemporary account by a foreigner is W.Burger [Théophile Etienne Joseph Thoré].

2. John Rosenberg describes the change in Ruskin after 1860 as being “of emphasis only, notof direction” (Rosenberg 41; see also 42–45). Like Rosenberg, most recent readers see closecontinuities between Ruskin’s artistic and social criticism, or perhaps an inability to separatehis concerns.

3. Ruskin cites the open contradiction between the sentiment and the building it decoratedseveral times in later years: “If anyone had really understood the motto from Keats, whichwas blazoned at the extremity of the ~rst Manchester exhibition building, they would haveknown that it was the bitterest satire they could have written there, against the building itselfand all its meanings — ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever.’ It is not a joy for three days,limited by date of return ticket.” “On the Present State of Modern Art, with Reference tothe Advisable Arrangements of a National Gallery” (1867), 19: 209. See also Aratra Pentelici(1870), 20: 212; and The Art of England (1883), 32: 323.

4. The similarity between Benjamin’s concept of aura and Ruskin’s response to the explosionof cheap reproductions in the second half of the nineteenth century has not been missed byrecent critics. See Austin 4–5, and Helsinger 138–39. Codell is interesting on magazinereproduction in particular.

5. Analysis of the issue recurs in Ruskin’s major works of the 1840s and ’50s. Seven Lamps ofArchitecture (1849):

let us consider for an instant what would be the effect of continually repeating an expression of abeautiful thought to any other of the senses at times when the mind could not address that senseto the understanding of it. Suppose that in times of serious occupation or of stern business, acompanion should repeat in our ears continually some favourite passage of poetry, over and overagain all day long. We should not only soon be utterly sick and weary of the sound of it, but thatsound would at the end of the day have so sunk into the habit of the ear that the entire meaningof the passage would be dead to us, and it would ever thenceforward require some effort to ~xand recover it. (8: 155–56)


Stones of Venice 3 (1853): “the charm of association which long familiarity with any scenetoo fatally wears away” (11: 359). Modern Painters 3 (1856): “Another character of theimagination is equally constant, and, to our present inquiry, of yet greater importance. It iseminently a weariable faculty, eminently delicate, and incapable of bearing fatigue; so that ifwe give it too many objects at a time to employ itself upon, or a very grand one for a longtime together, it fails under the effort, becomes jaded, exactly as the limbs do” (5: 182).

6. A useful summary of the topic in relation to Ruskin is provided in Austin 4–6. For moredetailed information on the historical development of printing in England, see de Maré,Dyson, Fox, Gray, and Hunnisett. For many examples of the popular reproduction ofpaintings, see Engen. Useful concrete analyses of the varied intersections of art and repro-duction in the period are provided in the issues of Victorian Periodical Review edited byCodell in 1991 (224.1–2).

7. The promotion of the Exhibition by text and image is readily apparent in the coverageprovided by the Illustrated London News over a number of weeks. See especially the issuesof May 2, 9, and 16, 1857.

8. Sherburne places Ruskin’s views on plenitude in the context of eighteenth and nineteenthcentury economic and social theory. His concern is the manner in which Ruskin challengeswhat he describes as a Victorian economic sensibility based on scarcity. His title is especiallyuseful: John Ruskin or the Ambiguities of Abundance. See also the chapter “Streams ofAbundance,” 69–93. Fellows offers a remarkable and compelling analysis of the oeuvre asinstantiating a perpetually inadequate organization confronting an overwhelming world inThe Failing Distance and Ruskin’s Maze.

9. It is worth nothing that Benjamin’s treatment of the lyric poet in the city also leads him intothe topic of reproduction. See, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939), an essay in whichBaudelaire’s response to the daguerreotype is intimately related to the poet’s anxiousawareness of the crowd and the threat both reproduction and proliferation present to theaura (188–94).

10. Garrigan presents Ruskin’s Academy Notes in the context of the art world he was challengingin “Bearding the Competition” and “‘The Splendidest May Number of the Graphic.” Herarticles are particularly interesting on the complex relationship between Ruskin’s account ofreproductive art and his efforts to alter his own methods of communicating with the public.

11. On the place of these lectures in Ruskin’s career see Hayman.12. As always in Ruskin, consumption and production are deeply intertwined. Hence his de-

scription of what he calls the “entire illustrative art industry of the modern press” bringstogether the darkness of the black arts with the characteristic fated, and hopeless speedwhich is the complement to their impermanence: “industry enslaved to the ghastly service ofcatching the last gleams in the glued eyes of the daily more bestial English mob, — railroadborn and bred, which drags itself about the black world it has withered under its breath, inone eternal grind and shriek, gobbling, staring, — chattering, — giggling, — trampling outevery vestige of national honour and domestic peace” (22: 469–70).

13. On Ruskin’s reform of his methods of production and distribution, see Garrigan,“Splendidest” 22 and Cook and Wedderburn, Preface, 27: lxxxii–lxxxvi.

14. “[W]hen I chose the title for the collected series of these lectures, I hoped to have justi~edit by careful analysis of the methods of labyrinthine ornament. . . . But the labyrinth of lifeitself, and its more and more interwoven occupation, become too manifold and too dif~cultfor me; and of the time wasted in the blind lanes of it, perhaps that spent in analysis orrecommendation of the art to which men’s present conduct makes them insensible, had beenchie_y cast away” (22: 451–52). On the history of the title, see 22: xxxvii–xl. On the importanttopic of mazes in Ruskin, see Fellows, Ruskin’s Maze and Hayman 15.


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BLACK ARTS, RUINED CATHEDRALS, AND THE GRAVE IN ENGRAVING: RUSKIN AND THE FATAL EXCESS OF ART

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