The Revaluation of ‘Christian’ Art: Ruskin’s Appreciation of Fra Angelico 1845–60

THE REVALUATION OF 'CHRISTIAN' ART: RUSKIN'S APPRECIATION OF FRA ANGELICO 1845-60 RICHARD]. DELLAMORA In Modern Painters and over a period of fourteen years, John Ruskin embraced, propagated, analysed, criticized, and finally repudiated the 'Christian' aesthetic in art In terms of the dialectic of 'Christian' and 'Pagan' or classical art in Romantic and early Victorian aesthetics, Ruskin's changing presentation to his readers of the art of Fra Angelico deserves particular study. Fra Angelico, the pious monk and painter of Vasari's Lives, was for Ruskin and his readers the type of the 'Christian' artist. As early as the summer of 1843 Ruskin, probably moved by A.F. Rio's De la poesie chretienne, wished to go to Italy 'in pursuit of the ancient school of religious painting' (I 494).' In September 1844, he wrote to the Reverend H.G. Liddell, telling that before writing the second volume of Modern Painters he intended to visit Paris and Florence 'chieRy to study the early Italian schools, for I want to bring the publiC, as far as I can, into something like a perception that religion must be, and always has been, the ground and moving spirit of all great art' (III 670). The Italian tour of 1845 became 'the decisive factor in making the second volume what it is' (rv xxiii). In Pisa, according to E.T. Cook, 'the Campo Santo with its frescoes opened to him a new world of simple and sincere religious art, and became to him, he says, "a veritable Palestine." His letters soon show him absorbed in copying and recopying from Giotto and Simon Memmi and Benozzo Gozzoli and Orcagna' (IV xxx). Already in 1844, he had been copying reproductions of Fra Angelico's works (rv xxiii). Moving from Pisa to Florence, he was deeply affected by Fra AngeliCO's works there. In a memo dated from Parma, he showed a sharp change in aesthetic values. Now he divided pictorial art into three types, the first of which he called 'Pure ReligiOUSArt. The School of Love.' At the head of the list came Fra Angelico, who 'forms a class by himself - he is not an artist, properly so called, but an inspired saint' ('v xxxiv; punctuation as in RIL 144). The result for Modern Painters 2 was 'an outcry of enthusiastic praise of religious painting' ('v xix). The work of the 'inspired saint' overwhelmed Ruskin only brieRy. UTQ, Volume XLm, Number 2, W inter 1974 144 RICHARD J. DELLAMORA However, the preparation of Modern Painters 2 had great effect on his choice and idea of vocation (rv xxiv; RIL xviii). According to his editors, Ruskin discovered 'the art of man in its full majesty for the first time' ('v xxiv) and in himself' "a strange and precious gift," enabling him to recognise it' ('v xxiv). 'He had heard a fresh call, and he accepted it; he must become an interpreter of the nobleness of human art, as well as of the beauty of nature' ('v xxrv). Schlegel had called for what amounted to religious conversion if art is to be practised well; Ruskin experienced such conversion in discovering his vocation as a critic of art? He conceived his own career as similar to Fra Angelico's in its spirit of dedication. Cook, unlike Schlegel and Ruskin himself in the letter to Liddell, casts the critical vocation in terms of classic humanism. The terms are accurate with regard to Modern Painters 5, not Modern Painters 2. In the earlier work, Ruskin emphaSizes the presence of God in nature either by type or immanence. The artist does not need to rival but humbly to reverence nature, in Cassirer's words to become 'the purely knowing subject, the clear eye that scans the world." 'The capacity to remain wholly perceptive, to lose oneself in seeing and to free knowledge' requires moral genius (Cassirer, 278). Similarly, Ruskin writes: The ideal of the good and perfect soul, as it is seen in the features, is not to be reached by imagination but by the seeing and reaching forth of the better part of the soul to that of which it must first know the sweetness and goodness in itself, before...