Читать книгу The Pre-Raphaelites - Robert de la Sizeranne - Страница 3

Until 1848, one could admire art in England, but would not be surprised by it. Reynolds and Gainsborough were great masters, but they were eighteenth-century painters rather than eighteenth-century English painters. It was their models, their ladies and young girls, rather than brushwork, which gave an English character to their creations. Their aesthetic was similar to that of the rest of Europe at that time. Later, Lawrence painted in England just as Gerard did in France. Walking through the halls of London museums, one could see different paintings, but no difference in manner of the painting, drawing, or even in the conception or composition of a subject. Only the landscape painters, led by Turner and Constable, sounded a new and powerful note at the beginning of the century. But one of them remained the only individual of his species, imitated as infrequently in his own country as elsewhere, belonging no more to a single region of the Earth than a comet belongs to a region of the sky, while the work of the other was so rapidly imitated and developed by the French that he had the glory of creating a new movement in Europe rather than the good chance of providing his native country with a national art. As for the others, they painted, with more or less skill, in the same way as artists of other nationalities. Their dogs, horses, village politicians, forming little kitchen, interior and genre scenes were only interesting for a minute, and even then the artists did not handle them as well as the Dutch. Thus, no one anticipated that out of all this something new and great would emerge. From time to time, a strange lightning bolt illuminated this reasonable and prosaic life. One of Blake’s small paintings showed the Prime Minister, Pitt, in the form of an angel wearing a green and gold robe, leading the English parliament, depicted with the appearance of the monster described in the book of Job[1], across the clouds. Then everything was again sleepy and calm; average people, average stories, average painting. Weak, muddy colours layered over bitumen, false and lacking in vitality, the shadows too dark and the highlights too intense. Soft, hesitating outlines that were vague and generalising. And as the date of 1850 approached, Constable’s words of 1821 resonated; “In thirty years English art will have ceased to exist.”

And yet, if we look closely, two characteristics were there, lying dormant. First, the intellectuality of the subject. The English had always chosen scenes that were interesting, even a bit complicated, where the mind had as much to experience as the eye, where curiosity was stimulated, the memory put into play, and laughter or tears provoked by a silent story. At the Victoria and Albert Museum, one is struck by this British taste for intellectual subjects. There we see scenes from The Bourgeois Gentleman, The Imaginary Invalid and The Learned Ladies, from Don Quixote, The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Taming of the Shrew, images taken from Duncan Gray or of Portia and Bassanio, in short, scenes from the theatre and literature of every country. These paintings are the work of Wilkie, Redgrave, Frith and Leslie. This was the art of the first half of the nineteenth century. It was rapidly becoming an established idea (visible in Hogarth) that the paintbrush was made for writing, storytelling and teaching, not simply for showing. However prior to 1850 it merely spoke of the pettiness of daily life; it expressed faults, errors or rigid conventional feelings; it sought to portray a code of good behaviour. It played the same role as the books of images that were given to children to show them the outcomes of laziness, lying and greed. The other quality was intensity of expression. Anyone who has seen Landseer’s dogs, or even a few of those animal studies in English illustrated newspapers where the habitus corporis is followed so closely, the expression so well-studied, the look of the animal so intelligent and so different depending on whether it is waiting, feeling fear or desire, questioning its master, or thinking, can easily understand what is meant by “intensity of expression”. It is not just “accuracy” that we mean, for this is not a distinctive characteristic of English art. Our wildlife artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also captured expressions accurately, and yet what a difference there is between Oudry’s or Desportes’ dogs in the Louvre and Landseer’s in the National Gallery in London! But, in the same way that intellectuality was only present before 1850 in subjects that were not worth the effort, intensity of expression was only persistently sought and successfully attained in the representation of animal figures. Most human figures had a banal attitude, showing neither expressiveness, nor accuracy, nor picturesque precision, and were placed on backgrounds imagined in the studio. They were prepared using academic formulas, according to general principles that were excellent in themselves, but poorly understood and lazily applied, fading away with the dimming memory of the old days of Reynolds and Gainsborough.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Mariana, 1870.

Oil on canvas, 109.8 × 90.5 cm.

Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums, Aberdeen.

Charles Allston Collins, Convent Thoughts, 1850–1851.

Oil on canvas, 84 × 59 cm.

The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford, Oxford.

John Everett Millais, Ferdinand Lured by Ariel, 1849–1850.

Oil on panel, 64.8 × 50.8 cm.

The Makins Collection, Washington, D.C.

Joseph Noel Paton, The Bluidie Tryst, 1855.

Oil on canvas, 73 × 65 cm.

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow.

Such was English art until Ford Madox Brown came back from Antwerp and Paris, bringing an aesthetic revolution along with him. That is not to say that all the trends that have emerged and all the individuality that has developed since that time emerge from this one artist, or that at the moment of his arrival, none of his compatriots were feeling or dreaming the same things that he was. But one must consider that in 1844, when William the Conqueror was exhibited for the first time, no trace of these new things had yet appeared. Rossetti was sixteen years old, Hunt seventeen, Millais fifteen, Watts twenty-six, Leighton fourteen, and Burne-Jones eleven, and consequently not one of these future masters had finished his training. If one considers that the style of composition, outline and painting ushered in by Madox Brown can be found fifty years after his first works in the paintings of Burne-Jones, having appeared in those of Burne-Jones’ master Rossetti, one must acknowledge that the exhibitor of 1844 played the decisive role of sower, whereas others only tilled the soil in preparation or harvested once the crop had arrived.[2]

What, then, was in the hand of this sower? In his head was the idea that art was clearly perishing because of the systematic generalisation of forms, and could only be saved by the opposite, that is, the meticulous pursuit of individual traits. In his heart was the indistinct but burning desire to see art play a great social role in England, that of bread rather than sweets reserved for the tables of the rich. Finally, in his hand were a certain elegant awkwardness, a slightly stiff delicacy, and a meticulous attention to detail that he had learned partly from the Gothic school of Baron Wappers in Antwerp, and partly from direct observation of the Primitives. All of this was quite revolutionary, and for that reason must have displeased the conservative spirit of the English. But it was also anti-French, anti-continental, absolutely original and autonomous, so it must have appealed to their patriotism for these reasons. “It was in Paris that I decided to do realistic paintings, because no Frenchman was doing it,” said Madox Brown. We shall not stop for the word “realistic”, which can have several different meanings depending on the country. Let us retain only this rallying cry against the French school and in favour of a national art.[3]

When Madox Brown arrived in London, the great competition begun in 1843 for the decoration of the new Palace of Westminster was underway and had produced no less than one hundred and forty works signed by the best artists of the day. This aesthetic tournament is an important date in English art history, because it helped then unknown leaders to stand out from the crowd. Watts, a young artist who had learned independently, had just been noticed there. Madox Brown had sent five large compositions. The principal one was an episode from the Norman Conquest: The Body of Harold brought to William the Conqueror. These were his first forays down a new path, his protest against old and official art. But no echo had responded to his call. His failure and the contempt of the public were so obvious that the day when the young master received a letter signed with an Italian name – Dante Gabriel Rossetti – in which the writer praised his work and asked to become his student, he had no doubt that this unknown man was mocking him.

John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott, 1888.

Oil on canvas, 153 × 200 cm.

Tate Britain, London.

A few days later, he presented himself at Rossetti’s home. “I was told,” recalls the poet, “that a man was asking to see me. This man wanted neither to come in nor to give his name, and was waiting in the corridor. So I went down to see him, and when I arrived at the bottom of the stairs I found Brown holding a large stick in one hand and waving my letter about in the other. Instead of greeting me, he cried out: ‘Is your name Rossetti and was it you who wrote this?’ I responded in the affirmative, but I was shaking in my boots. ‘What is the meaning of this letter?’ he asked, and when I replied that I meant exactly what I had said, that I wanted to be a painter and had no idea what I should to do become one, Brown began to realise that the letter was not a mockery but a sincere homage, and he immediately changed from a mortal enemy into the gentlest of friends.”[4] This young man, who appeared so unexpectedly to join ranks with Madox Brown, was only twenty years old. He was the son of an Italian exile, born in the little town of Vasto d’Ammone perched in the mountains of the Abruzzo region. It was because his father, a highlander curious about civilisation, had gone down to Naples and worked for many years as a museum curator that the ideas of art and of great art had entered into his family. It was because this protector of the ancient gods was also a destroyer of modern monarchies, a poet known for his impetuous songs who so incriminated himself that in 1820 the return of the Bourbons saw him thrown onto English soil. And finally, it was because he married the sister of one of Byron’s friends, the doctor Polidori, that his children could gather from the memories, passions and grief of the family an echo of all the great patriotic pains that had unsettled the youth of that century. All of these events were perhaps necessary so that, in March 1848, the Gothic art of Madox Brown left some impression other than that of scandal or outmoded charm on an inhabitant of London. While the English remained indifferent to what would become their national art, the young Italian applauded it with enthusiasm and, thanks to the allowance granted by his grandfather Polidori, began his apprenticeship as a painter. Madox Brown, thinking that the first priority was to force this fiery spirit to conform to the rigid discipline of reality, had the future creator of Dante’s Dream work at copying tobacco boxes. Rossetti, who had gone through his academic courses without learning much, resigned himself to follow the advice that he had requested, for better or for worse. He worked impatiently, passionately, carelessly and in disorder, cleaning his palette with bits of paper that he threw on the ground and that later stuck to the boots of visitors, starting twelve paintings at once, then falling into complete prostration, weary, disgusted with everything and with himself, finishing nothing, no longer wanting to listen to anyone, and rolling on the ground letting out awful moans. Then he disappeared for a month. Madox Brown was not angered, thinking that his student had heard some voices from the heavens calling him to other work. These voices were those of the “trecentists” (thirteenth-century Italian poets) that he listened to in the libraries, as he was trying himself to create sonnets and poems.

Frederick Sandys, Morgan-Le-Fay, 1864.

Oil on panel, 61.8 × 43.7 cm.

Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, Birmingham.

John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott, c. 1894.

Oil on canvas, 120 × 68 cm.

Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds.

William Holman Hunt, The Lady of Shalott, 1886–1905.

Oil on canvas, 188 × 146 cm.

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT.

Sidney Harold Meteyard, “I am half-sick of shadows”, said the Lady of Shalott, 1913.

Oil on canvas, 76 × 114 cm.

The Pre-Raphaelite Trust.

He sent the fruit of his efforts to renowned poets, such as Leigh Hunt, and to others who were less well known, such as William Bell Scott, and asked them, after offering great praise for their verses, what they thought of his. He sent them manuscripts of masterpieces of grace and subtlety such as the Blessed Damozel as well as other lesser pieces under the title Songs of the Art Catholic, which made these rationalists and Protestants shudder. Then, with his half blind father he took up a discussion on the Divine Comedy that the old man had interpreted, and with his brother William Michael and his sister Christina, he gave a dissertation on the halo in the Middle Ages. Everyone in the household wrote verses.[5] No-one understood his temperament at all; that of a dilettante passionate about everything, an improviser speaking about everything at once, an anti-papist revolutionary interested in angels and saints, and a painter concerned with rhythm and rhyme. Oddly enough his prestige grew because of it. Gaunt and dark, with a foreign accent and appearance, a rounded forehead and gleaming eyes, his hair falling down to his shoulders, his beard cut in the style of a Neapolitan fisherman, careless in his dress and covered with stains, he seemed infinitely superior to the average artist to the young people studying painting at the Royal Academy. His passion for the picturesque side of things, his disdain for the discoveries of science, the continuous motion of his mind, and his mysticism crossed with a desire to sell his paintings at very high prices must have completely disconcerted even his close friends. He painted, wrote, painted again, rewrote, fell in love with his model, Miss Siddal, hesitating ten years before finally making up his mind to marry her. Then an unexpected event took this beloved woman away from him, and he threw his manuscripts, his most beautiful poems, into her coffin and refused for seven years to dig them up. Changing his mind, he went forward with an appalling and terrible ceremony, had the manuscripts that had been buried with the dead woman disinterred, and earned an excellent profit from them in pounds sterling. Finally, on his deathbed, after an entire life of complete indifference to religion spent in a milieu of freethinkers and adversaries of Romanism, he asked his appalled friends for priest, a confessor…

While Rossetti was copying tobacco boxes in Madox Brown’s studio, one of his classmates at the Royal Academy was making desperate, superhuman efforts to create a place for himself as an independent artist and thus escape from a future in business. His name was William Holman Hunt, and he was twenty-one years of age. His father, a businessman with a small enterprise in the City, had tried everything to dissuade him from his artistic career. But never has fatherly prudence been so obstinately thwarted by destiny. At twelve years old the boy spent his time drawing instead of learning, so he was taken out of school and given a job as a clerk in an auctioneer’s office. One day Hunt’s new employer caught him hiding something in his desk, and insisted on knowing what it was.

Walter Crane, The Lady of Shalott, 1862.

Oil on canvas, 24.1 × 29.2 cm.

Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Foundation, New Haven, CT.

He discovered that it was a drawing, and was filled with joy. “It’s good,” he said. “On our first free day, we will shut ourselves in here and spend the day painting.” This lasted for a year and a half, after which the young man was placed in a warehouse run by one of Richard Cobden’s agents. There he met another assistant whose principal task was to draw ornaments for the company’s fabrics. Naturally, the young Hunt helped him with his task and dreamed more than ever of becoming an artist. Meanwhile, he spent his savings taking lessons from a portrait painter who was a student of Reynolds. One day, an old orange merchant came to his warehouse to offer her produce, and Hunt made such a lifelike portrait of her that word of it spread among all the neighbours and reached the ears of the elder Hunt. The son took advantage of these circumstances to declare that he would be a painter and nothing but, and the exhausted father gave in. For a long time, Holman Hunt struggled with poverty, engaging in various sorts of drudgery to try to escape it. He reproduced the paintings of the masters on behalf of other copyists and retouched portraits that no longer pleased their owners, either because they were not lifelike enough, or because they were too lifelike, or because the clothing in them had gone out of style. He failed the entrance examinations for the Royal Academy twice. After a thousand setbacks, threatened with returning to business or going to work in the countryside with his uncle, a farmer, he finally succeeded.

Fortunately, his career had a few good moments here and there. During his time at the Academy, Hunt met a young man two years younger than himself named John Everett Millais, practically a child, who surprised his masters with his marvellous talent. At fifteen, he had already won a medal for his studies of ancient art. Everything seemed to promise him a most brilliant career. The two young men often spoke about the future, about their own, but also about that of English art, which they found had aged poorly. They spoke of the heavy, dreary, blackish colours that they were taught to use in school, comparing them with the light, lively, musical hues used by the great masters of the past and found in nature, and asked themselves how one could substitute the former for the latter. Hunt was struck by something a passer-by had said to him while he was copying Wilkie’s Blind Fiddler at the National Gallery: “You will never achieve the freshness of Wilkie if you paint over brown, grey, or bitumen. If you first cover the canvas with neutral colours, certain ones for the shadows and others for the light, like they teach you to do at the Academy, these backgrounds will eventually come out from under your colours and blacken them. Wilkie painted on a white canvas, without a coloured ground, and finished his painting bit by bit like a fresco.”[6] This advice from the unknown man came at exactly the right time, not because it was excellent in itself, but because it pointed out a heroic remedy. Hunt and Millais both thought about it and, after examining the few Primitive paintings that they saw here and there in the galleries, they began wondering if their eternal freshness came from this straightforward working method, without under-painting and mixing tricks, that the masters before Raphael had imported from fresco painting, where it is unavoidable, into oil painting, where it was later abandoned. In these Primitive masters, where Madox Brown had mostly noticed gestures that were individually created and not learned by rote, poses taken not from a mannequin or the famous figures of masterpieces but from nature, the two young men saw a light, brilliant colour that they set out uncertainly to achieve.

Edmund Blair Leighton, The Accolade, 1901.

Oil on canvas, 180.9 × 108.5 cm.

Private Collection.

Walter Crane, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, 1865.

Oil on canvas, 46.3 × 56.5 cm.

Private Collection.

John Everett Millais, A Dream of the Past: Sir Isumbras at the Ford, 1857.

Oil on canvas, 124 × 170 cm.

Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight.

Sir Frank Dicksee, Chivalry, c. 1885.

Oil on canvas, 183 × 136 cm.

The FORBES Magazine Collection, New York.

Besides aesthetic discussions, Holman Hunt’s other great pleasure was reading. Poets, historians, philosophers and scholars, he devoured everything that came into his hands. Like Flandrin, he trained his mind and his eye at the same time, and after painting all day long, he read all through the night. One evening, one of his studio companions brought him a book by an Oxford graduate that had only recently appeared but was constantly being reprinted: The Modern Painters. Holman Hunt leafed through the book, first with curiosity, then with admiration, and finally with enthusiasm. This was not one of those volumes of vague, idle chatter that one is accustomed to categorising as aesthetics, a discussion about art by one of those literary renegades who write badly and do not draw at all. It was a swift plea, eloquent and passionate, in favour of naturalist landscapes and rejecting composed academic ones. It was a glittering study full of facts and examples where one sensed the experience of a practising artist behind each theory, a dissertation where one felt that every stroke of the pen had been preceded by a stroke of the brush. And it was also beautifully written, employing the richest, strongest and most concise language that could be imagined. Hunt was captivated. These pages were written by a stranger, but nonetheless seemed to have been created specifically for him, for they expressed so clearly the very things he felt vaguely in his soul. So he spent the night hunched over the book, reading. What then? This, for example: “And it ought to be a rule with every painter, never to let a picture leave his easel while it is yet capable of improvement, or of having more thought put into it. The general effect is often perfect and pleasing, and not to be improved upon, when the details and facts are altogether imperfect and unsatisfactory. It may be difficult, perhaps the most difficult task of art, to complete these details, and not to hurt the general effect; but, until the artist can do this, his art is imperfect and his picture unfinished. That only is a complete picture which has both the general wholeness and effect of nature, and the inexhaustible perfection of nature’s details. And it is only in the effort to unite these that a painter really improves. By aiming only at details, he becomes a mechanic; by aiming only at generals, he becomes a trickster; his fall in both cases is sure.”[7]

The author also said: “Now it is, indeed, impossible for the painter to follow all this; he cannot come up to the same degree and order of infinity, but he can give us a lesser kind of infinity. He has not one-thousandth part of the space to occupy which nature has; but he can, at least, leave no part of that space vacant and unprofitable. If nature carries out her minutiae over miles, he has no excuse for generalising in inches. And if he will only give us all he can, if he will give us a fullness as complete and as mysterious as nature’s, we will pardon him for its being the fullness of a cup instead of an ocean. But we will not pardon him, if, because he has not the mile to occupy, he will not occupy the inch, and because he has fewer means at his command, will leave half of those in his power unexerted. Still less will we pardon him for mistaking the sport of nature for her labour, and for following her only in her hour of rest, without observing how she has worked for it. After spending centuries in raising the forest, and guiding the river, and modelling the mountain, she exults over her work in buoyancy of spirit, with playful sunbeam and flying cloud; but the painter must go through the same labour, or he must not have the same recreation. Let him chisel his rock faithfully, and tuft his forest delicately, and then we will allow him his freaks of light and shade, and thank him for them; but we will not be put off with the play before the lesson, with the adjunct instead of the essence, with the illustration instead of the fact.”[8]

Edward Burne-Jones, The Perseus Series: The Rock of Doom, c. 1884–1885.

Gouache on paper, 154 × 128.6 cm.

Southampton City Art Gallery, Southampton.

Edward Burne-Jones, The Perseus Series: Perseus and the Sea Nymphs (The Armament of Perseus), 1877.

Gouache on paper, 152.8 × 126.4 cm.

Southampton City Art Gallery, Southampton.

The young painter read the book from cover to cover, hoping that before falling asleep he would find what he had been seeking for so long; a call to arms against academic generalisation and a superior model that could be opposed to the academic models. Finally, he came upon this page, the last in the volume and, at the time, the most audacious that had ever been written: “From young artists nothing ought to be tolerated but simple bona fide imitation of nature. They have no business to ape the execution of masters; to utter weak and disjointed repetitions of other men’s words, and mimic the gestures of the preacher without understanding his meaning or sharing in his emotions. We do not want their crude ideas of composition, their unformed conceptions of the Beautiful, their unsystematised experiments upon the Sublime. We scorn their velocity, for it is without direction; we reject their decision, for it is without grounds; we re-probate their choice, for it is without comparison. Their duty is neither to choose, nor compose, nor imagine, nor experimentalise; but to be humble and earnest in following the steps of nature, and tracing the finger of God. Nothing is so bad a symptom in the work of young artists as too much dexterity of handling, for it is a sign that they are satisfied with their work and have tried to do nothing more than they were able to do. Their work should be full of failures, for these are the signs of efforts. They should keep to quiet colours, greys and browns; and making the early works of Turner their example, as his latest are to be their object of emulation, should go to nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, and remember her instruction rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing; believing all things to be right and good, and rejoicing always in the truth.”[9] The call to arms had been found.

Who, then, was the writer who, on this page written in 1843, gave the precise formula for realism well before the realists, at the time when Courbet and those like him were still children or barely out of school, still struggling to find their way? He, too, was almost a child. He had written this book when he was but twenty-three years old in a small house in Herne Hill, in the Surrey hills outside London. He had spent several years travelling with his parents in Italy and along the banks of the Rhine in Switzerland, amassing documents, copying paintings, studying leaves and flowers under a microscope, running through the museums and mountains with pencil in hand, sketching the mouldings of a cornice or the grand lines of a glacier. Then, determined to express his admiration for Turner and praise this great artist, he made use of all of his observations and all these examples, and cried out to a stupefied England that nothing in the world was more beautiful than nature and art, and that a great people that expressed itself could became artists whenever they wanted. The product of all this was the first volume of Modern Painters. Then, over the next five years, he wrote those prodigious evocations of human monuments and divine things, of ancient thought and vanished inspiration: The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Stones of Venice, Aratra Pentelici, The Val d’Arno, Sesame and Lilies, The Queen of the Air, The Eagle’s Nest, Ariadne Florentina, Mornings in Florence, and Laws of Fesole.

John William Waterhouse, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, 1893.

Oil on canvas, 112 × 81 cm.

Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt.

William Holman Hunt, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus, 1851.

Oil on canvas, 98.5 × 133.3 cm.

Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, Birmingham.

In these works, this authoritative guide, this sovereign of aesthetics committed himself to curing art of bad taste, but on condition of blind obedience; these works so full of analytic acuity and creativity that one could call them poems of art criticism.[10] John Ruskin (for it was he) delighted the English imagination for forty years with his appreciation of the heavens, clouds, woods, waters and rocks, and raised his country progressively to his level of enthusiasm, whose ridiculous but very sincere expression was aestheticism. Understanding from the outset that his compatriots would not understand if he spoke to them of nature and art only in terms of beauty, he spoke to them of truth and goodness, of usefulness, morals, biblical thought, and the curiosities of science. Though he had a single goal, he used many different approaches. He was by turns a scholar, an historian, an anti-papist, an economic moralist, a poet, a botanist and a geologist, and through his charming and learned discourse he attracted even the most resistant Englishmen to the idea of beauty. All of the winding paths in his historical promenade brought them inevitably to the same point, which was the social mission of art and its supremacy over all other things. This is the man who would protest against railways because they were ugly, who would forgive popes because they loved beauty, who would found aesthetic festivals in convents and museums in working-class neighbourhoods, and who would resurrect the guilds of the Middle Ages because they were picturesque. He would create a workshop in Westmoreland with thirty women working on spinning wheels modelled after those of the Campanile de Giotto, and a workshop in Laxey on the Isle of Man where the black wool from the island’s sheep was woven without the help of any modern machine, because manual work developed the muscles and made the human body more beautiful. Examples of Ruskin’s aesthetic despotism and the submission of his admirers are known throughout England. One day, the great aesthetician declared that he did not understand why apple trees in bloom were never depicted in paintings, since nothing was more “aesthetic” than a blooming apple tree. The following year, the walls of the exhibitions and galleries were covered with apple trees in bloom. Another time, a woman was filled with the desire to copy nature and asked him for advice in choosing a model. “I will send it to you,” he responded, and a short while later she found a cart at her doorstep containing an enormous paving stone. She was not astonished, and began meticulously studying this stone.

Arthur Hughes, The Knight of the Sun, undated.

Oil on panel, 28 × 39 cm.

Private Collection.

Besides this anecdote, there are many other examples of the punctuality with which the prescriptions of this sovereign of aesthetics were followed. Indeed, a tourist who follows the injunctions of Mornings in Florence when visiting the city of Savonarola could leave the banks of the Arno having seen neither the Tribune, nor the Palazzo Pitti, nor the Palazzo Vecchio, nor the Loggia, nor San Marco, nor most of the other things for which one generally visits Florence. But he will have shivered behind the funerary monument of the marquise Strozzi Ridolfi in the cloister of Santa Maria Novella, and ruined his eyesight in a dark chapel of Santa Croce, and it would be a miracle if, while contemplating the Campanile from all directions, exposed to the air with his feet in the mud, he didn’t get a stiff neck. Now, these aesthetic stations were shown to around thirty English men and women, for six days in a row, in the order prescribed by Ruskin. These aesthetes could be found peering at the rays of sunlight in the Bardi chapel in front of Giotto as prescribed in Book III, and scrutinising the narrow door in the fresco The Triumph of Saint Thomas Aquinas. They were seen running from Santa Maria Novella to the Uffizi at a quarter past eleven, just as Ruskin desired, and hurrying from the Duomo to the Spanish Chapel’s Chiostro Verde in order to compare the effects of the vaults, without losing a moment looking right or left down the street that they were crossing to avoid weakening the impression on the eyes. Finally, they were seen at the tombstone of Galileo Galilei, at the entrance of Santa Croce. And in the solemn shadow of the temple, listening to the profound and eloquent words of this great admirer of beauty, one experiences a striking sensation. One forgets that this visit is part of an immutable Cook’s tour. The magic of the great writer makes it again possible to see these places as part of an aesthetic pilgrimage. One seems to see Brother Egidio and Saint Louis moving silently toward one another in the depths of the old chapel, as in the legend where they see one another for the first time, embrace without exchanging a single word, and leave one another forever…

At the time when the young Hunt read his first work, John Ruskin was not yet a universally-known author whose books were reproduced by the million, but his keen words already carried authority. However, this authority was only honorary; he was listened to but not followed. To create a revolution in painting, even the most eloquent criticism is not sufficient: one needs painters to do the job. John Ruskin did not find them close to him, and scanned the horizon to no avail, wondering if a few new men might appear whom he could make into his disciples.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Wedding of St. George and Princess Sabra, 1857.

Watercolour on paper, 36.5 × 36.5 cm.

Tate Britain, London.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, How Sir Galahad, Sir Bors and Sir Percival Were Fed with the Sanct Grael; but Sir Percival’s Sister Died by the Way, 1864.

Watercolour on paper, 29.2 × 41.9 cm.

Tate Britain, London.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Sir Galahad at the Ruined Chapel, 1859.

Watercolour on paper, 29.3 × 33.9 cm.

Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, Birmingham.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Before the Battle, 1858, retouched in 1862.

Transparent and opaque watercolour on paper, mounted on canvas, 41.4 × 27.5 cm.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.