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 ofArtAuthor(s): Jonah SiegelSource: Victorian Literature and Culture, Vol. 27, No. 2 (1999), pp. 395-417Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25058461 .

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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

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 figures for engraved reproduction is to speak about his troubled relationship to a modernity in which excess and impermanence present

complex and interrelated challenges. The ruined cathedral in my title occurs in lectures

Ruskin 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 the

height 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 worth

considering 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-Treasures Exhibition (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 have stood ? it is we who have dashed down the carved work with axes and hammers, and bid the

mountain-grass bloom upon the pavement, and the sea-winds chaunt in the galleries. (Ruskin 16: 65)

It may seem that Ruskin is overstepping a little, that his audience of industrialists and

merchants of the British Midlands, whatever their faults, are hardly to blame for the

pathlessness of the desert, the sea-winds blowing through ruined cathedrals. And yet, there are specific ways in which the responsibility of the public of Manchester towards

decayed and decaying works of art is more than fanciful. At this locus of indigestible accumulation and the self-satisfied love of art, Ruskin launches an uncomprising attack on

accumulation 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

395



396 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

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

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 an

audience, was an ideal place for Ruskin to draw attention to the threat presented by

plenitude (Figure 10). He shares with the organizers of the exhibition the desire to make

art more widely accessible, but the pressure resulting from a thronging audience as well as

from the accumulation of art itself inspires a fear of losing value in quantity. Season tickets

were sold in order to allow repeated visits and a train line was built to bring visitors as near

as possible, but it was widely acknowledged that the exhibit in itself was impossible to

absorb 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, fine

cabinetmaking, inlaying, the art of enameling pottery, of doing repouss? work with metals, of

cutting crystals.... Imagine a palace all of glass, in which would be found gathered the great

gallery of the Louvre, the Cluny Museum, the cabinet des M?dailles, the reserve deposits of the 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)



Ruskin and the Fatal Excess of Art 397

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

Ruskin gave the remarks he delivered at the Exhibition two titles: "The Political

Economy of Art" became, on its reissue in 1880, "A Joy Forever (and its price on the

market)." 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 identified these lectures as the beginning of the second part of his career, when he turned most fully towards social questions ("political economy"). But the theme

of right management which he develops is also directly engaged with the issues urgently

suggested by the event which was the occasion for his remarks, specifically, with how art

might be usefully administered when it is seen as a stream of goods needing conceptual

organization.2

The new title Ruskin gave his lectures more than twenty years later ? "A Joy Forever" ?

represents his desire to reiterate the importance of their original context. The

first line of Endymion ("A thing of beauty is a joy forever") had been engraved on the

principal archway over the entrance to the exhibition. Ruskin is concerned enough with

this circumstance to draw attention to it many years later in the opening to the Preface of

the 1880 reissue of the lectures; he makes clear that a kind of ironic contextualization is

the very purpose that the new title serves:

The title of this book, ?

or, more accurately, of its subjects,. .. will be, perhaps, recognized

by some as the last clause of the line chosen from Keats by the good folks of Manchester, to




be written in letters of gold on the cornice, or Holyrood, of the great Exhibition which

inaugurated the career of so many. (16:11)

By sending his readers back 23 years, Ruskin invites them to consider the relationship between event and argument. Central to his discussion is the irony of endless time ? of

forever ? crowning the physical manifestation of an impermanent phenomenon, one

perhaps 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 order

to 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, any

essential beauty possessed by a work of art, which is not based on the conception of its honored permanence, and local influence, as part of appointed and precious furniture, either

in the cathedral, the house, or the joyful thoroughfare, of nations which enter their gates with

thanksgiving, 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 simple and sophisticated: Ruskin's theme is the direct relationship between the accumulation of

aesthetic objects and the destruction of the possibility of their enjoyment. The argument comes together at the figure of the audience; he is talking about the responsibility of the

public in relation to its aesthetic pleasure or fatigue. In such a context, the importance of

objective 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 by

challenging his hosts, presenting accumulation as fundamentally dangerous to the appre ciation of art. The second of the two lectures, "The Accumulation and Distribution of

Art," 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 of

art has a crucial effect on the consciousness receiving it,

the amount of pleasure that you can receive from any great work, depends wholly on the

quantity of attention and energy of mind you can bring to bear upon it. . . . If you see things of 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 worn

out; 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, but

disconnected, jumble. Ruskin anticipates more recent critics when he questions whether

it is better to scatter a small amount of attention over many pictures than it is to focus a

great 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 of

art of any kind, is always in some degree fenced and closed about with difficulty. (16: 58)

The target of this argument is the weakening of what Benjamin would later call the aura

of the art object by the mode of its presentation. Benjamin's well-known account in "The

Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" suggests that a great deal of the

power of art is due to its distance from the audience, the loss of this distance being an

integral part of modernity's relationship to art. What is not always remarked on ? perhaps

because reproduction seems a more urgent question in the present era ? is that his

analysis of the problem is as much a response to nineteenth-century cultural institutions as to twentieth-century technology. Like Ruskin, Benjamin includes both reproduction and exhibition in his treatment of the experience of art in modernity. It is exhibition which

provides 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. The

simultaneous 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 means

occasioned exclusively by photography but rather in a relatively independent manner by the

appeal of art works to the masses. (236)4

Benjamin ascribes "the contemporary decay of the aura" to a desire for intimacy with

the art object which is part of a fundamental challenge to uniqueness inherent in mass

society. His argument links developments in technology with developments in culture he

deplores, but it does not give precedence to technological change. Instead, Benjamin identifies a complex phenomenon whereby "the desire of contemporary masses to bring

things 'closer' spatially and humanly" is intimately allied with a drive "toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction" (225). Benjamin, like

Ruskin, attempts to resist the loss of distance which is facilitated by reproduction and

exhibition, to oppose (rather than accept) that "Conquest of Ubiquity" which gives its title to the essay by Val?ry which inspired Benjamin's own:

the amazing growth of our technologies, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the

ideas and habits they are creating make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component, which can

no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our

modern knowledge and power. (Val?ry 1284)

Val?ry's "ubiquity" is a condition which affects the valuation of all objects, not only those

being 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 not

touch 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 the

century, is whether accumulation and reproduction will become part of the production of

work, 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 is

important 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 engraved

reproductions of art, particularly as mediated through the press. Techniques of engraving had become so much more efficient and economical in the nineteenth century that it was

possible to support a vast demand.6 Whereas art lovers in previous centuries had had to

rely on extremely expensive forms of reproduction which, as a matter of course, confined

the experience of reproduced art to a relatively small number of people and limited even

the repertoire of images available to a comparatively small number, Thomas Bewick's

epochal invention of wood engraving in the early nineteenth century soon led to the

proliferation 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 an

important organizer of the Great Exhibition and involved in the founding of the south

Kensington Museum that would become the Victoria and Albert, but well before those

events, he anticipated from contemporary technological developments effects closely related to that which was aimed at by those structures of exhibition: "The great end of the

whole art of engraving" he notes in 1838, "is to render the spirit and genius of a great artist

accessible to the thousands, or the millions, by embodying them in cheap and portable forms. Wood engraving, professedly the cheapest and most portable of all the repre sentations of great pictures, excels equally in fulfilling 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 the

Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in 1832 with the express aim (as formulated

in the preface to the first volume), "to gratify a proper curiosity, and cultivate an increas

ing taste, by giving representations of the finest Works of Art, of Monuments of Antiquity, and of subjects of Natural History, in a style that had been previously considered to belong

only to expensive books." A footnote in the same volume referring to a print of one of the

most 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 such an image satisfies: "The Cartoons," it notes, "are shown, with the other pictures, to

visitors, upon payment of a fee to the person who goes round the apartment. We hope, when the new National Gallery is finished that they will be removed to London, so that

the public may be delighted and improved by their contemplation without the exaction of

sixpences and shillings" (n.386). The circulation of this journal reached 200,000 in its first

year, a success that was matched by the various periodicals that followed closely on its

heels. As my argument is about the speed of change and the problem of excess, it may be

as well to list some of these notable successors. The Penny Magazine was followed by Punch in 1841 and the Illustrated London News in 1842. On the continent, 1843 saw the

establishment of a number of foreign analogues: LTllustration, Die Illustrierte Zeitung.

Throughout the middle of the nineteenth century, the pace of founding of new magazines did not slacken; Harper's Weekly began in 1857, and Cornhill Magazine in 1860. The

proliferation I am trying to illustrate was not simply a matter of variety of journals, but of

numbers 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 writers

and others concerned with the diffusion of art. In 1846, an anonymous author declares in

the Art Union, "engraving on wood is destined to do far more for 'the million' than it has




[Christ delivering the Keys to St. Pster.]

Figure 11. From Raphael, "Christ delivering the Keys to St. Peter." Wood engraving, from

Penny Magazine (December 1,1832).

yet done; if our artist will aid our wood engravers, they will effect great things for the

mass" (qtd. in Fox n.9). The Penny Magazine featured regular articles on "The Lives of

Remarkable 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, there

were close links connecting the popular press, the growth in art exhibitions, and the

supporters of an ever-growing access to reproduced art. Joseph Paxton first sketched out

his design for the Crystal Palace on June 11, 1850; it was published in the Illustrated

London News on the sixth of July, less than a month after first being conceived. "The

Crystal Palace," it should be remembered, was a name first given to that structure by Punch. In a wonderful mis-en-abyme acknowledgement of this relationship, in 1851 the

Illustrated London News offered its readers an image of the journal being run off, to the

fascination of numerous onlookers, on a "Patent Vertical Printing Machine" running within the confines of the Crystal Palace itself during the Great Exhibition ? the work of

the illustrated journal becoming both instance and means of diffusing the new ubiquity of

the printed image (Figure 13). Six years later, the Illustrated London News was deeply

implicated in the development and promotion of the Art-Treasures Exhibition, recording in vivid detail the planning, construction, and opening of that event, as well as its reception

by 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




THE FEXInY MAGAZINE.

Figure 12. "Titian, and Group from his Venus and Adonis." Wood engraving, from Penny

Magazine (June 14,1845).




Figure 13. "Patent Vertical Printing Machine. In the Great Exhibition." Wood engraving,

from Illustrated London News (May 31,1851).

noting the substance behind Ruskin's concerns. These prints, from which so much was

expected, were not only cheaper and readily available, but of a dramatically lower quality than the kinds connoisseurs had admired for centuries. Nevertheless, although Ruskin is

disturbed by the decline in quality of these reproductions, his real concern is for the

necessary loss of aura, of deep intense attention, implied by the presence (the orara-pres

ence) of such works in culture.8 His lectures at the Art-Treasures Exhibition gave Ruskin

the opportunity to launch a forceful attack on the values motivating the event, hence the

recurrent concern with the danger of cheap prints in A Joy Forever; exhibition and

reproduction 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 of

contemporary masses to bring things 'closer'") is intimately allied with the ubiquity of

reproduction. Ruskin offers an impassioned but sophisticated analysis of the cultural

effect of the ubiquity of reproduction:

of one thing you may be sure, that art which is produced hastily will also perish hastily; and

that what is cheapest to you now, is likely to be dearest in the end. I am sorry to say, the great

tendency of this age is to expend its genius in perishable art of this kind. . . . There is a vast

quantity of intellect and labour consumed annually in our cheap illustrated publications; you

triumph in them; and you think it so grand a thing to get so many woodcuts for a penny. Why,




woodcuts, penny and all, are as much lost to you as if you had invested your money in

gossamer. More lost, for the gossamer could only tickle your face, and glitter in your eyes; it could not catch your feet and trip you up: but bad art can, and does; for you can't like good

woodcuts as long as you look at the bad ones. If we were at this moment to come across a

Titian woodcut, or a Durer woodcut, we should not like it ?

those of us at least who are

accustomed to the cheap work of the day. We don't like, and can't like, that long; but when we are tired of one bad cheap thing, we throw it aside and buy another bad cheap thing; and so keep looking at bad things all our lives. (16: 41-42)

Ruskin's diagnosis is evidently more than a simple complaint about taste; he recognizes that modernity itself is not satisfied by the abundance which characterizes it, but is instead

driven by an inescapable, perpetual disappointment. As the appetite is not ultimately satisfiable by cheap images, proliferation is the sole answer; perpetual change is the only relief for the jaded sensibility. The analysis has a doubled target; by drawing attention to

the real labor that is expended in the effort to feed the desire for disposable images, Ruskin identifies 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 quite

satisfy it.

II. The Black Arts

IF ruskin is prescient in his analysis of the psychological effects of cheap mass produced art in 1857, thirty years later he is remarkable in his treatment of a problem which

evidently had not gone away, but had only become more urgent. The onslaught of cheap

images did not abate; it rather increased at an astonishing rate ? including not only

wood-engravings, but photographs and photogravures. Ruskin's response to photography is complex; it was a medium he often used, with pleasure and fascination, to document

buildings 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 in

the Magazine of Art (1887; published 1888), one which captures precisely the combination

of the real and the figurative in his treatment of the topic: "The Black Arts: A Reverie in

the Strand." The Black Arts is, of course, the term under which are categorized the

practices of magic, or even necromancy. They are black because they are forbidden or

hidden. It is just Ruskin's joke, however, that the arts he has in mind are black because

they are precisely the contrary of forbidden, and not hidden at all. They are also literally

black, these arts, because they reduce everything to the black lines of ink which make up the reproduced image.

The second part of the title, though openly pedestrian, is also important ? "A

Reverie on the Strand." Reproduction has had a special relation to the city since at least

the eighteenth century; the representation of print buyers has allowed artists as diverse as

Rowlandson 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. The

text of the brief article locates us vividly in the city, along with a wandering Ruskin who

paints himself as a bewildered superannuated flaneur overwhelmed by the pace of change in the metropolis:




I don't know London any more, nor where I am in it ? except the Strand. In which, walking

up and down the other day, and meditating over its wonderful displays of etchings and

engravings and photographs all done to perfection such as I had never thought possible in my younger days, it became an extremely searching and troublesome question with me what was

to come of all this literally "black art," and how it was to influence the people of our cities.

(14: 357-59)

Ruskin identifies 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 metropolis become 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 times as wise and long as they were in the light?

The Answer ? what answer was possible to me ? came chiefly in the form of fatigue,

and a sorrowful longing for an old Prout washed in with Vandyke brown and British ink, or even 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 of

reproduction is a challenge to his career-long celebration not only of art, but of the faithful

reproduction of nature:

No one has pleaded more for finish than I in past time, or oftener, or perhaps so strongly, asserted the first principle of Leonardo that a good picture should look like a mirror of the

thing itself. But now that everybody can mirror the thing itself ? at least the black and white of 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 first half-dozen proofs used to 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 thoughts on the aesthetic experience. His evident awareness of the psychological element in the love of art is what keeps him from being an unqualified supporter of the accumulation of

art ? "I begin to wish for a little less to look at." But Ruskin is disingenuous in suggesting that this is a new desire; it is one that he has held for a long time. In his inaugural lecture as Slade Professor of Art at Oxford in 1870, Ruskin had presented the problem as arising from 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, and

some of the best talent of modern times, are occupied in supplying this want; and there is no limit to the good which may be effected by rightly taking advantage of the powers we now

possess of placing good and lovely art within the reach of the poorest classes. Much has

already been accomplished; but great harm has been done also, ?

first, by forms of art

definitely 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 influence on the

public mind; ?

which weary it by redundant quantity of monotonous average excellence, and

diminish 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 developing ideas 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 in

which it arises. Seeing in modernity the triumph not only of mass production, but of the mass experience of the image, Ruskin cannot help but identify the inescapable effect of

such phenomena on the production of art. Thus, his review of the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1875 ironically returns the art to its source, making the principal artists of

the 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 the

Exhibition as a whole. The Royal Academy of England, in its annual publication [meaning the exhibition itself], is now nothing more than a large coloured Illustrated Times folded in

saloons, ? 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 may

ultimately be more impressive than what he takes to be the feeble colored forms of the

Exhibition:

Yet observe, in saying that Academy work is now nothing more, virtually, than a cheap coloured woodcut, I do not mean to depreciate the talent employed in it. Our public press is

supported by an ingenuity and skill in rapid art unrivalled in any period of history; nor have I 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 ordinary

workmen for a daily newspaper finishing their drawings on the blocks by gaslight, against time. (14: 264)

In the gaslight and hurry which is the setting of the illustrators' work, Ruskin evokes that

characteristic 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, the

other side of impermanence. Those workers rush because the images they illustrate are of

transient value and so must be brought out as soon as possible.

HI. 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 very modern 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 more

lethal figure ? "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 Ruskin

published as Ariadne Florentina (1873-76).11 Delivered at Oxford in 1872, these lectures

contain 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 his conviction that "engraving, and the study of it, since the development of the modern finished school, have been ruinous to European knowledge of art" (22: 463). I have indicated 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 carves

designs he had no role in making. Audience and art producer are trapped in a deadening cycle of mutual unsatisfiable need:

In the miserably competitive labour of finding 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 by

myriads; ? and among the docile, many of the best intellects we possess. (22:470)12

Nevertheless, the grave qualities involved in reproductive technologies are more than

simply lethal; in Ruskin tombs and graves are not only sites of death, they also hold a special fascination as places of beauty which modernity has forgotten how to love. Sites of burial and their associated memorials are, of course, central to Ruskin's analyses of art; from the

sepulchers of Venetian Doges to the funeral effigy of Ilaria del Carretto in Lucca, they recur as 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 definable as architecture of the tomb" (23:25). The conclusion of a 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 time between 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 witnesses

of what we have laboured for, the more wide and rich will be the measure of our success. Men

cannot benefit those that are with them as they can benefit those who come after them; and

of all the pulpits from which human voice is ever sent forth, there is none from which it reaches so far as from the grave. (8: 233)

In Ariadne Florentina, Ruskin recuperates the act of engraving with the audacious claim that the real essence of this serious art is the scratch, the carving, the en-graving. His play on words is a reminder at once of linguistic and of actual facts; it allows him to propose that rather than being naturally suited to its current function, engraving itself has been debased by being made a mere instrument of reproduction. Ruskin carries out an

astonishing transvaluation of the medium, turning it from an essentially secondary repro ductive form to "the first of the arts" (22: 305). His account raises the fundamental act of

engraving, when rightly understood and correctly practiced, to being the precondition, no

longer the simple record, of architecture and sculpture: "engraving, though not altogether in the method of which you see examples in the print-shops of the High Street, is, a prior art to that either of building or sculpture, and is an inseparable part of both, when they are rightly practised" (22: 304).




Ruskin focuses on the work of the engraver: not on the making of the copy, but on

the carving of the plate; to engrave, he insists, is to make "the most permanent of furrows."

He repeats this definition for emphasis, "a permanent cut or furrow." It is not lost on

Ruskin that what he proposes recuperates engraving from its later and more common

meanings. In his definition, it is "essentially the cutting into a solid substance for the sake

of making your ideas as permanent as possible, graven with an iron pen in the Rock for ever. Permanence, you observe, is the object, not multiplicability;

? that is quite an

accidental, 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, the

graver, 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 solid

ploughshare, which, instead of throwing the earth aside, throws it up and out, producing at first a simple ravine, or furrow." (22: 348).

Picking up on the central motivating argument of the "The Nature of Gothic" chapter of Stones of Venice, Ruskin demonstrates that the ever-increasing technical perfection of

engraving is not only pernicious for the consumer, but for the producer as well. I have

mentioned how in his review of the 1875 Royal Exhibition Ruskin made the paintings on

display into illustrated prints (with apologies to the printmakers). In the course of the

lectures that became Ariadne Florentina, he held up "Astraea Redux," a political cartoon

by Tenniel taken from a recent issue of Punch (Figure 14). Giving this ephemeral piece the focused attention generally reserved for the highest art (the close attention to the part that he has already given the term "engraving") he finds in it passages of real but

dangerous achievement. He damningly praises the piece for containing "as high qualities as it is possible to find in modern art." Blending his social and his aesthetic analyses, he

focuses on the rich dark passages in the cartoon, comparing them to those in images from

an 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 over

the reproduced image without a thought to the workmanship involved. The reason to

focus on the dark parts of the engraving is that the number of cross-hatchings the artist's

pen 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 perpetual

onslaught of image is for the viewer: "the rapid work, though easy to the artist is very difficult 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 other

hand, has kept himself to a limited number of cuts ? suggesting the intimate link between

his work and that of the craftsman, or that, in fact, he himself was the carver of his own

design. Ruskin's analysis will be familiar to any reader of "The Nature of Gothic." He

celebrates 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 not

for 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. "[EJngraving means, pri

marily, making a permanent cut or furrow in something," Ruskin notes, before going on

to indicate the difficulty presented by this recovered definition: "The central syllable of




PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI.?Nov?mber 2, 1872.

ASTIUEA REDUX!! Sir Olives Surface (Mr. Bull).

" HERE COMES THE INCARNATION OF ALL THE VIRTUES. OF COURSE, SIR PETER, YOU'LL PRAISE THE NEW LORD CHANCELLOR?"

Sia Peter Teazle (Mr. Punch). " WAIT A BIT, SIR OLIVER. THIS IS A D-D WICKED WORLD, AND THE

FEWER PEOPLE WE PRAISE THE BETTER." School for Scandal {slightly altered).

Figure 14. John Tenniel, "Astraea Redux!!" Wood engraving, from Punch (November 2,

1872).




97. Now I take up Punch, at his best. The whole of

the left side of John Bull's waistcoat?the shadow on his

knee-breeches and greatcoat?the whole of

the Lord Chancellor's gown, and of John

Bull's and Sir Peter Teazle's complexions, are worked with finished precision of cross

hatching. These have indeed some purpose in their texture; but in the most wanton

and gratuitous way, the wall below the

window is cross-hatched too, and that not with a double,

but a treble line (Fig. 4). There are about thirty of these columns, with thirty-five

interstices each : approximately, 1050?certainly not fewer?

interstices to be deliberately cut clear, to get that two

inches square of shadow.

Figure 15. John Tenniel, "Astraea Redux!!" (detail of cross-hatching). Wood engraving, from

John Ruskin, Ariadne Florentina. The Works of lohn Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander

Wedderburn. Library Edition. (London: George Allen, 1906). 22: 359.

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 modern

development. The fear of the grave, the inability to see it as productive, has been a

foundational error of modernity. Ruskin's lectures function, much like Holbein's images as a kind of memento mori; the attempt to reclaim the value of the graven is closely allied

with a transvaluation of the power of the grave. That both have become signs of transience

and meaningless consumption is part of his diagnosis of the modern condition. Death as a

limit or boundary adding significance to life, the carved line aiming at permanence by means of controlled, difficult work on hard material (stone, metal, wood)

? these are

elements that make the recuperation of the grave possible. Modernity responds to imper manence with reiteration, with the proliferation of disposable reproduced work; Ruskin

proposes instead a challenge to impermanence at its base. Ruskin argues that the artistic

work evident in modernity, and the appetite which it whets and leaves unsatisfied combine

into a death in life to which an actual end might serve as a reprieve rather than a sorrowful

final surrender. The grave in Ruskin offers rest, rather than constant change, and the

possibility of permanence in memory or tomb.

Holbein's Dance of Death runs through the lectures like the skeletons run through that 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 worth

noting that these works of German engraved art are not at all in the purview of Ruskin's

originally-advertised topic, "Sandro Botticelli and the Florentine Schools of Engraving." He wrenches Holbein's images into his presentation because of the economical way in

which they engage his grave theme. Like all memento mori, Holbein's work calls attention

to the imminence of the grave, and the serious implications of its proximity. Ruskin




introduces the series with two images, whose particular subjects resonate with the themes

he develops in his lecture and which motivate his analysis of reproduction generally. What

he describes as "two of the best wood engravings ever produced by art" (22:352) are wood

cuts showing death approaching or harassing a priest as he delivers his sermon and death

driving the oxen which move the plow of a weary farmer (Figures 16 and 17). As Ruskin's attempt to celebrate Italian work that he identifies with a purity and

healthiness of execution now lost is overtaken by grimmer topics, Holbein becomes a

far more important figure than Botticelli (the artist he wrongly believed to have been

responsible for most of the prints discussed in Ariadne Florentina). Ruskin identifies the

German 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 Ruskin

himself than the more confident Italian work. Tracing Holbein's critical sensibility to the

effect of working during a period of spiritual turmoil, Ruskin describes an artist "always

melancholy . . . and entirely furious in his indignation against all who, either by actual

injustice 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 finds himself in deadly darkness, in "the valley of the shadow of death" (22: 416). But, if it is easy to locate a connection between

Ruskin's critical aspirations and those he attributes to Holbein, it is no less clear that

Ruskin identifies analogical figures for himself within the prints themselves; it is a par ticular sign of the sophistication of Ruskin's critical sensibility that he identifies at once

with the preacher in Holbein's engraving and with the death-figure 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 figure of Death that has come

to interrupt the preacher: "Death comes quietly: / am going to be preacher now; here

is 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 and

sealed. There's your text for to-day" (22: 355). With the link between graver and plow well established, the analogy between the work of the plowman, "pressing the iron into the ground" is readily identifiable with that of the engraver when rightly understood. In

Ruskin's interpretation, death is a comfort and help to this carver. Again, it is good to

remember that Ruskin was speaking these remarks, making the pronominal ambiguity a rich one: "Tt is a long field,' says Death; 'but we'll get to the end of it to-day,

? you

and F" (22: 355). Ruskin could not help but be preoccupied with the presentation and diffusion of his

own work. His self-imposed and widely influential role was to encourage the knowledge and admiration of art; and yet, particularly late in his career, as he became ever more

uncomfortable with the nature of publicity and publication, he sought out varied forms in which to make his ideas known that might overcome the challenges of more standard methods. 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, and not only speak of, his values.13 In the grave death-haunted preacher, Ruskin presented to

his own audience a more solemn form of communication than the transient importunings of a venal mass media. I have noted that an important theme in Ariadne Florentina is that

the grave ? like the graven

? need not be a sign of spiritual death. Hence the presenta




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 and

Alexander Wedderburn. Library Edition. (London: George Allen, 1906). 22: facing 352.

Figure 17. Hans Holbein, Dance of Death, "The Last Furrow." Facsimile from woodcut, from

John Ruskin, Ariadne Florentina. The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander

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 fertile

earth.

The lectures as a whole will end with two long passages from the Memoir of Thomas

Bewick (1862), the famed inventor of wood engraving. In the first, Bewick insists on

the 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-binder

who abandoned his early training for the priesthood in order to devote a life of frugal

modesty 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 his

friends accompanying him to his grave. With these extracts Ruskin picks up on the

resonant images from Holbein ? of priesthood, death, and plowing ? that he had

offered his students early in the lectures. His own final brief paragraph is a simple comment on the tomb of Gilbert Gray: "And what graving on the sacred cliffs of Egypt ever honoured them, as that grass-dimmed furrow does the mounds of our Northern

land?" (22: 460). It is difficult to cut hard matter with a sharp implement. Each line requires focus,

self-control, and attention; in recuperating the grave in engraving Ruskin proposes that

the importance of reproductive technology has been misunderstood, that its possible

power has been trivialized. I have tried to suggest in this paper some of the ways in

which Ruskin's apparently fanciful figures for the situation of art in modernity have a

content beyond their rhetorical effectiveness. I would emphasize in closing that much

of what is tortuous or elaborately figurative in Ruskin can be traced to that complex

historicizing 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 have

dashed down the carved work with axes and hammers" he notes in the passage from

1857 with which I opened this paper. Ruskin's ruined cathedral, his black arts, and the

grave in engraving, are so many ways to describe the complex challenge to attention

presented by a modernity inundated by cheap images. The title of the lectures, Ariadne

Florentina, is referred to only once by Ruskin, and only as he suggests his failure to

develop its significance.14 Ariadne's clue is a thin line of safety with love at one end

and danger at the other; its function is not to spare Theseus his trial, but to retrieve

him after he has confronted the threat at the heart of the labyrinth. The single line of

thread allows the possibility of egress by recapitulating the challenging form confronted

on the way in; it neither breaks the maze nor maps out the structure in its entirety. In

spite of his protestations of having failed to develop on his title, Ruskin has certainly made clear the importance of the labyrinthine: that intricate detailed elaboration which

is only clarified by careful attention ? it is this that the line of engraving reveals, a

line that takes the form of the maze in order to serve as the clue which provides a

hope of escape. It has become something of a commonplace to refer to Benjamin's account of the loss of aura caused by reproduction. Careful attention to the work of

John Ruskin may allow, if not the actual recovery of the aura of the original work, at

least a richer form of mourning for its loss. By focusing on the attention of the audience

on the one hand, and on the work of the printmaker on the other, Ruskin makes a

plea for difficulty, for the virtues of the labyrinthine. In this analysis, each impermanent

piece 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. The

kind of attention Ruskin brings to bear allows what can seem merely ephemeral the

opportunity 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 the

better-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 Holt

166-67. Herrmann notes that eight weeks after opening, the Exhibition was still attended by 9,000 people a day. A good many guides were produced, their titles indicating their role in

directing an intrigued, but often confused, public around the exhibition: What to observe at

Manchester; 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 to see and where to see it! or the Operatives Guide to the Art-Treasures Exhibition. Several

contemporary accounts of the exhibition exist, among them, The Art-Treasures Examiner: A

Pictorial, Critical and Historical Record of the Art-Treasures Exhibition at Manchester in 1857

is a particularly useful resource. An interesting contemporary account by a foreigner is W.

Burger [Th?ophile Etienne Joseph Thor?]. 2. John Rosenberg describes the change in Ruskin after 1860 as being "of emphasis only, not

of direction" (Rosenberg 41; see also 42-45). Like Rosenberg, most recent readers see close continuities between Ruskin's artistic and social criticism, or perhaps an inability to separate

his concerns.

3. Ruskin cites the open contradiction between the sentiment and the building it decorated several times in later years: "If anyone had really understood the motto from Keats, which

was blazoned at the extremity of the first Manchester exhibition building, they would have

known that it was the bitterest satire they could have written there, against the building itself and 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 to

the 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 explosion

of cheap reproductions in the second half of the nineteenth century has not been missed by recent critics. See Austin 4-5, and Helsinger 138-39. Codell is interesting on magazine

reproduction in particular.

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

let us consider for an instant what would be the effect of continually repeating an expression of a

beautiful thought to any other of the senses at times when the mind could not address that sense

to the understanding of it. Suppose that in times of serious occupation or of stern business, a

companion should repeat in our ears continually some favourite passage of poetry, over and over

again all day long. We should not only soon be utterly sick and weary of the sound of it, but that

sound would at the end of the day have so sunk into the habit of the ear that the entire meaning of the passage would be dead to us, and it would ever thenceforward require some effort to fix

and recover it. (8:155-56)




Stones of Venice 3 (1853): "the charm of association which long familiarity with any scene

too fatally wears away" (11: 359). Modern Painters 3 (1856): "Another character of the

imagination is equally constant, and, to our present inquiry, of yet greater importance. It is

eminently a weariable faculty, eminently delicate, and incapable of bearing fatigue; so that if we give it too many objects at a time to employ itself upon, or a very grand one for a long

time 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 more

detailed information on the historical development of printing in England, see de Mar?,

Dyson, Fox, Gray, and Hunnisett. For many examples of the popular reproduction of

paintings, 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 by CodeU in 1991 (224.1-2).

7. The promotion of the Exhibition by text and image is readily apparent in the coverage

provided by the Illustrated London News over a number of weeks. See especially the issues

of May 2, 9, and 16,1857. 8. Sherburne places Ruskin's views on plenitude in the context of eighteenth and nineteenth

century economic and social theory. His concern is the manner in which Ruskin challenges

what he describes as a Victorian economic sensibility based on scarcity. His title is especially useful: John Ruskin or the Ambiguities of Abundance. See also the chapter "Streams of

Abundance," 69-93. Fellows offers a remarkable and compelling analysis of the oeuvre as

instantiating a perpetually inadequate organization confronting an overwhelming world in

The 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 into

the topic of reproduction. See, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" (1939), an essay in which

Baudelaire's response to the daguerreotype is intimately related to the poet's anxious

awareness of the crowd and the threat both reproduction and proliferation present to the aura (188-94).

10. Garrigan presents Ruskin's Academy Notes in the context of the art world he was challenging in "Bearding the Competition" and "The Splendidest May Number of the Graphic." Her

articles are particularly interesting on the complex relationship between Ruskin's account of

reproductive 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" brings

together the darkness of the black arts with the characteristic fated, and hopeless speed which is the complement to their impermanence: "industry enslaved to the ghastly service of

catching the last gleams in the glued eyes of the daily more bestial English mob, ? railroad

born and bred, which drags itself about the black world it has withered under its breath, in one eternal grind and shriek, gobbling, staring,

? chattering,

? giggling,

? trampling out

every 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 justified it by careful analysis of the methods of labyrinthine ornament.. .. But the labyrinth of life

itself, and its more and more interwoven occupation, become too manifold and too difficult

for me; and of the time wasted in the blind lanes of it, perhaps that spent in analysis or

recommendation of the art to which men's present conduct makes them insensible, had been

chiefly cast away" (22:451-52). On the history of the title, see 22: xxxvii-xl. On the important

topic 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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