“Setting Up Home”

My boyfriend and I have been "setting up home", which sounds incredibly archaic. In more modern terms, we have moved in together for the first time, into an unfurnished flat (white goods included). Thankfully, it is a very tiny flat, so furnishing it from bottom up has not been as difficult as it might have been. Some things were kindly given to us second hand by our families – the bed, and a chair. Sometimes, for the sake of practicality or where we wished to avoid the bugs and lice of previous owners, we extravagantly splashed out on something NEW – our sofa, for instance, terrifyingly purchased via the internet.

Those are the basics taken care of. For the rest, we had to ask ourselves, what kind of space did we want to live in? This is not a question that seems to preoccupy many people our age. We are unusual in our peer group for beginning this dull, adult life so soon. I was talking to a friend after she finished her finals (mine having finished a year ago, since which time I have already worked and left a challenging professional role) and we were discussing our ambitions for careers. A career, here, was opposed to the unbelievable banalities of, say, ‘setting up home’. She recounted the unimaginable horror of friends who had made a photo album of setting up and decorating their house. ‘There main conversation is about cushions and curtains!’ – what could be worse?

Perhaps a more pertinent question is what the alternatives are for people of my generation. Lachlan Harris, recently writing for the Guardian, condemned my contemporaries as the ‘live-at-home-forever, get-a-blog-but-not-a-real-job generation’. Though I instinctively feel a pang of defence for those who write recreationally, or more seriously, there is a more general and valid observation here: growing up is not admirable. Indeed, growing up (in the sense of getting a ‘real job’ and doing ‘real’ things that maintain one’s own existence: cooking, washing, cleaning) is really seen as a failure, I think. Much better be a penniless student living in squalor, or travel the world living out of a suitcase. Living in any kind of semi-permanent environment is apparently a denial of youth.

So, it seems I am writing this as the antithesis of youth, one who has caved in to the banal and insignificant world of cushions and curtains, instead of getting out there and changing the world. In the light of my short experience since university, this surge of hostility seems to be a simple denial of just how dull the necessary facts of live are. Once you have lived on your own, you realise that if you have very much time remaining after you have fed yourself, kept yourself and your surroundings clean, and earned enough to sustain your barest existence, you’re doing rather well.  If this grind does not appeal, travelling, studying and living at home will not solve your problems, only delay them.

So, is it simply incredibly sad that, looking round my flat now, I am filled with calm and aesthetic joy at the space I have created? That I enjoy folding down the desk of my £25 oak bureau every time I use it, and that I admire the form and the glaze of a little ceramic bowl that we bought, every time I drop my keys into it? Half of me thinks so –every time a friend comes round I wax lyrical about how being so domestic really isn’t for me, and I don’t care about all this stuff really. In a sense, that is true. In the long run, I want my study and love of aestheticism to reach beyond this tiny flat. I would like to support my own existence by doing something meaningful, even if it is small, which will make the world slightly more interesting or beautiful for my having lived in it. ‘Setting up home’ is not where it ends, but I think it is a valid beginning – a sense which has been joyfully confirmed by the reading of a lecture by William Morris, part of a series entitled Hopes and Fears for Art.

In reading his first essay, on ‘the lesser arts’, I cannot tell whether the sympathy I feel for his sentiments is as a fellow aesthetic objector, in a world which fundamentally has not changed since his lectures, or whether I sympathise because in the present day I see realised his fears of the 1870s. I suspect the former. On the one hand it is heartening – I am not alone! On the other hand, it is terrifying. We, at least I, think of the Victorian period as a time when money was invested in beautiful details, which today we would consider superfluous, but which we nevertheless value greatly in our Victorian heritage. The last house I lived in was a tiny Victorian terrace, built for the factory workers who worked on the outskirts of Oxford. It was tiny when I lived in it, yet 50% larger than its original size thanks to an extension at the back, affording a kitchen downstairs and bathroom upstairs. It was built to house a family on probably a fraction of the income I received on a modest salary in publishing. Yet, it was beautiful. Without a careful observation of detail, it is hard to tell why this house would generally be considered beautiful, in contrast with much budget housing that has been built since the Second World War. It seems, on first appearance, to be quite plain and uninteresting.

Then, you notice that the brick work has been laid so that every other brick is grey coloured and has been laid width-ways, so that its end rather than its side forms the face of the wall. This results in textured, chequerboard effect. The windows are well proportioned, the bottom one, indeed, obeying the age-old golden ratio. Above the windows and door some stones fan out, larger than their chequerboard neighbours, and painted in contrasting white, lending richness to the red brick. Below the windows, small protruding ledges are also painted white. Lastly a horizontal seam of bricks separate the ground and first floor, of three bricks in height, all laid lengthways. The top and bottom row are in purely red brick, raised outwards from the face of the wall in two ridges. The middle row is set back and of grey brick. Trivial details? Not in monetary terms: this house is worth twice as much as some 1960s flats elsewhere in Oxford, which are of twice the size. More importantly, if these details had been omitted, you would have noticed, as would (I suspect) the many other inhabitants it has seen pass through over the last 120 or so years.

Leaving this little house to one side, the Victorians gave us the Royal Albert hall, the arts and crafts movement, the sumptuous pre-Raphaelite pictures, quality furniture (such as the bureau, £25, I currently write at). And yet, Morris despaired of the popular disinterest in the arts that he perceived around him, save the slavish following of ‘fashion’. He bemoaned ‘the cravings of the public for something new, not for something pretty’. His very use of the word ‘pretty’ is revealing. It is used by Morris with respect and earnestness, while now it is more likely to be used in a derogatory, or at least dismissive way. If there are two qualities which can immediately disqualify a work from being modern art they are (a) prettiness and (b) likability. I’m not arguing that everything that is pretty or likable is interesting, enduring, thought-provoking, moving or anything else, but it strikes me as odd to wage war on these qualities to quite the extent that modern ‘high art’ has. And it's not only 'high art' that has renounced the beautiful, but our high street too. As a famous contemporary of Morris observed: 'Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months' (Wilde). 

My instinct is that little has changed since Morris and Wilde made these observations. Many of my contemporaries would much rather purchase a new desk at a cost of over £100, built out of plastic rather than wood, than risk being considered ‘old fashioned’ and buy something beautiful for a quarter of the price (such is our valuation of some treasures of the past). If so little has changed in over 100 years since Morris wrote and delivered this lecture, I can’t help but wonder if things have never really been much different from how they are today: the arts largely unvalued and struggling for funding, the ultimate value of the ‘new’ at the expense of anything enduring, both in material quality and taste. It is when Morris writes of a past golden age he is at his least convincing: ‘Time was when mystery and wonder of handicrafts were well acknowledged by the world, when imagination and fancy mingled with all things made by man’. This ornamental and poetic language, though undoubtedly beautiful, seems to expose the fictional nature of these elegised, bygone days. No specifics. It is almost as if Morris is not seeking to refer to an historical moment in the past – ‘In the year * when…’ – but rather evaluating time. Time does not exist in a meaningful sense any more, it only ‘was’ when slippery ideas such as ‘mystery’ and ‘wonder’ were latent in every useful object. Maybe there was never such a time, when the potential for beauty in the everyday really mattered to the general public, not just to a textile designer like William Morris, not just to those privileged to a thorough education in some aspect of the arts. Perhaps it is arrogant and immoral of me to believe that this ‘time that never was’ would have been desirable. If most people do not greatly enjoy opera, or theatre, or novels, or poetry, or art, or symphonies, who am I to say they are important (except in so far as everyone is entitled to his or her opinion)?

This matters to me. It matters a lot. I want to study how the arts work, how they affect people and investigate how they have significance in our lives. I want to explore whether the idea of beauty has any traction beyond a historically-contingent fashion. I dream of throwing away all my savings on an MPhil, and when that money runs out, of possibly even being funded towards a doctorate, so that at some point beyond this, I am seen as qualified enough to make a difference. But all  this fanciful dreaming is predicated on the notion that the arts are important, that they do affect people, that people’s lives are qualitatively enhanced by access to art of all types. If this isn’t true, what a load of inconsequential nonsense I am invested in.

In some ways I face a greater challenge than Morris. In this lecture, Morris was arguing about the importance of beauty in everyday things, whereas I bat for art forms which are considered horribly elitist. Classical music?! Opera?! Painting?! Poetry?! Many will say that you need an elitist education in order to appreciate these. Tolstoy argued that true art was only that which could be appreciated without any sort of education or knowledge. Unfortunately for Tolstoy, that left very little in Western culture at least which could be considered true art. Really, almost all human inventions require a little knowledge or skill to be appreciated. Even Glamour Magazine: you can’t appreciate even this most democratic culture, without the education which teaches you to read. I had a similar education whereby I learnt to ‘read’ music. As far as I remember, it was not more difficult that learning to read books, it’s just that it is not valued enough in society to be taught to everyone. 

My battles aside, let us return to Morris: have the battles he fought for (the importance of beauty in the everyday) been lost? In one way, we have lost this value (if we ever had it), in that we do not prioritize quality of workmanship, or durability – certainly not on a nationwide scale. I myself am a culprit – I own cheap clothes that I knew when I bought them would only last a matter of months. Behind me, sitting at my oak bureau, there is a melamine bookcase, which we bought for the sake of having something straight away, and will throw away as soon as we can afford a wooden one. On the TV, the programmes on everyday aesthetics such as garden and interior design often focus on the quick achievement of superficial transformation at a low price, rather than the gradual care and acquisition of furniture than lasts and gardens that develop beautifully year after year.

However, we do watch such programmes, and we do spend money on making our surroundings pleasant. Bizarrely, I often think people spend their lives trapped in ugly towns and cities until they can escape into their own houses, where they can finally let rip their appreciation of the beautiful by painting their walls, hanging pictures, buying cushions and curtains, and all those things which my generation consider trivial, banal and even pathetic. But it matters. It’s a truism so boring that I hesitate to commit it to paper (to screen) – the people and things closest to us have the greatest effect on our lives. That’s why we take such care over finding partners to live with, over the friends we confide in, on (I imagine) teaching our children to be decent human beings, on training our pets to be affectionate and well-behaved. So I think it’s ok that to talk about cushions and curtains. As Morris points out, ‘everything made by man’s hands has a form, which must be either beautiful or ugly’. So, in my mind, all things being equal, we are quite justified in taking care that we make the world more beautiful, rather than ugly. 

The Metamorphosis Exhibition at The National Gallery

The poster for this exhibition, widely publicised, promised an imaginative and lavish collaboration of art forms inspired by three of Titian’s masterpieces, inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The lithe, intertwined bodies of two dancers form a dynamic canvas onto which Titian’s Diana and Actaeon is projected. The contours of the bodies evoke the fleshy physicality of Titian’s portrayals, rendering even the serene sky behind the red cloth charged with the erotic sculpting of the toned female stomach. The positioning of the woman’s arms emphasises the gestural shape of Actaeon, while the male dancer’s embrace suggests the erotic tension in Diana’s chastity: his arms both protectively conceal her breasts and encircle her in a cradle of control. The vision of the exhibition is equally inspiring, an exciting interdisciplinary collaboration of modern artists, composers, choreographers and poets, responding to three paintings of 500 years ago.

The concept of Titian’s three paintings being at the heart of this exhibition clearly informed the physical layout: radiating from a diamond-shaped room displaying Diana and Callisto, Diana and Actaeon and The Death of Actaeon were six other rooms, with an additional Exhibition Cinema on the way out. However, this implied connectivity was not realised in the works. It seemed that many of the artists called upon had struggled to respond to Titian’s work. Wendy Cope admitted that she wasn’t ‘terribly drawn’ to paintings of mythical scenes (in a video which can be accessed via the exhibition website) while Ofili felt the need to ‘free’ himself from Titian by returning ‘back to Ovid’. In addition to the modern, scientific aversion to mythology, the invocation of Classical dress and architecture can further alienate the modern response. 

However, perhaps the element which seemed most challenging in responding to Titian’s work was the theme of chastity, which lies a t the heart of both stories. Callisto is banished by Diana and later turned into a bear when she is discovered to be pregnant (having been raped by Jupiter), while Actaeon is turned into a stag and killed by his own hounds for intruding on the sacred privacy of grotto in which Diana is bathing. This tension between erotic potential and a steely chastity is embedded in Titian’s paintings. The overtly feminine and untoned bodies of Diana and her nymphs may perhaps seem even more eroticised to a modern audience used to the thin, boy-like physiques of glamour models. However, in Diana and Actaeon, there is a striking disjunction between Diana’s large, sensuous body and her small, focused face, fixing a piercing glare upon the intruder. Similarly, despite the lavish profusion of limbs and bare flesh, from Actaeon’s point of view the scene seems untouchable. He does not physically connect with the scene upon which his presence has such an impact; he is separated from the nymphs by a glassy pool, his left hand not even quite touching the red drapery. The positions of Diana and her nymphs give an overall dynamic of recoil, with four of the torsos angled away from the incoming Actaeon. Some of the women are not yet disturbed by his presence – the nymph drying the goddess’s calf, for instance – but there is a sense of hostility and fear in the faces turned towards him. 

Despite the potential incongruity between the theme of chastity and 21st century society, I was surprised this tension seemed so widely ignored. Instead, unadulterated sexuality seemed to be the order of the day. The most talked-about installation, Mark Wallinger’s Diana, highlighted this focus. The room is very dark, except for light leaking from an enclosed ‘bathroom’ in the centre, into which there is an blurred window, and a few cracks and peep-holes. One has to make a real effort to see in, making the experience profoundly uncomfortable. In forcing the viewer into this voyeuristic, intrusive position, the work is effective and thought-provoking. But, it seems to have much more to do with modern concerns of prohibited desires and surveillance culture, than with Titian or Ovid, both of whom emphasise the unpremeditated action of Actaeon. Similarly, though Ofili claimed to return to Ovid as the source for his works, he seemed to have freed himself from the subtleties of this influence, as well as that of Titian. His works are liquid and vividly coloured (a response to the names of Diana’s nymphs), and his set design conjured the supernatural and organic atmosphere of these myths. However, like Wallinger’s installation, the paintings are dripping with images of lust and desire, contrary to the inadvertent intrusion of Actaeon and the rape, (not seduction, rape), of Callisto. Golding’s translation of this scene from Ovid could not be clearer:

The wench against him strove as much as any woman could.
I would that Juno had it seen, for then I know thou would
Not take the deed so heinously.

Diana’s reaction then, in both cases, is uncompromising and severe, captured by Titian in the calculated and controlled gesture of dismissal in Diana and Callisto, and Diana’s active pursuit of Actaeon in The Death of Actaeon, which as Nicholas Penny points out, is Titian’s most glaring departure from Ovid’s text. The most perceptive responses to Titian highlighted this aspect. While some of the costume designs hinged on the most simplistic links with the story, such as the moon as a symbol of Diana, the costume which licked the ballet dancer playing Diana in a firey red captured her aggressive role in these stories. Most effective, however, in suggesting the ambiguous nature of Diana as simultaneously sexualized and sterile, victim and aggressor, feminine and masculine, was Shawcross’s installation, Trophy. An industrial robot curves and swings round its prey like a mesmerising snake, ready to strike. Its light-tipped wand hovers around a stag’s antler carved out of blocks of different woods. This would seem to be the eponymous trophy from the corpse of the dead Actaeon, examined by the victor. However, a more subtle balance of associations is at work. The powerful and mechanical nature of the robot evokes masculinity, not to mention the phallic wand. The examining light distils the power of the gaze, both in Actaeon looking on Diana, and her condemnatory stare recorded by Titian. Yet the movements of the robot are feminine, sinuous and graceful. The antler is a male symbol used by the animal to display prowess, and physically involved in fighting, yet it is now also the symbol of a victim. It is made of an organic substance which links it to Diana’s wooded dominion, yet is represents the neutralisation of the sexual threat it once advertised. In a fairly dimly-lit exhibition, this was the only room which might have benefited from greater darkness, to draw attention to the light from the wand, and the changing shadows its movements might have impressed upon the wooden antler.

The collaboration between the ballet and this project had enormous potential. This seemed the most interesting and innovative part of the project, and may well have been very effective in the final product: ballets screened by the Royal Opera House on 16th July. Having missed these, the glimpse offered of this process in the Choreographic room and the Exhibition Cinema was intensely frustrating. It was impossible to form a sustained appreciation of the interpretation, symbolism and creative vision involved in this fantastic project. Much more effective (if less ‘fair’ to all the choreographers involved) would have been an in-depth exploration of the process of creating one routine, involving interpretative discussions, rehearsal, performance and reflections, rather than the scattergun selection of disjointed clips.

This exhibition had so much potential to be at the forefront of interdisciplinary art. It was a shame that some of the resulting artwork seemed to see the Titian as a constraint to be ‘broken away from’, rather than as an inspiration to be closely scrutinised. The potential for an exploration into the touching points and differences between media was not fully grasped. In addition, the false premise of letting the art ‘speak for itself’, probably concealed much of the interesting interpretative and creative response which the paintings provoked. The collection felt like a drawstring bag of interesting contents, when the drawstring just needed tightening to bring all the elements more closely together. The potential for creating original art which yet remained a close and observant response was best realised in the most unobtrusive and yet most accessible part of this exhibition. On a chair in the first room of Titians were a couple of little books containing poems commissioned by the exhibition from the foremost poets in Britain today. This book is available for purchase, but even better the poets can be viewed reading their own poems and explaining the process of writing on the exhibition’s website. My analysis of some of these works will form a future blog entry. In the meantime, do go and watch these poems: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/poems-inspired-by-titian/.

Thoughts on Representation

“we're made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
And so they are better, painted -- better to us,
Which is the same thing. Art was given for that” [1]

What is it about art that can make even the most realistic representations ‘better to us’ than the very reality they seek to capture? Browning’s observation – that paintings can make the observer love what they have never cared about in reality – is by no means new. Aristotle notes in section 6 of his Poetics that ‘there are things which we see with pain so far as they themselves are concerned but whose images, even when executed in very great detail, we view with pleasure’[2].  There is something, then, fundamentally different between experiencing reality and experiencing a representation of that reality, and that difference fundamentally concerns pleasure. To answer what is so different, I will propose three answers, exploring the latter two in detail through the writing of Hopkins and the ekphrastic work Ruskin. Ekphrasis, the representation of art by another work of art in a different medium, has a special part to play in this discussion because of the way in which it can highlight the capacities and boundaries of different art forms, and thus their relation to reality.

The three answers then: the first is simply the fascination excited by the nature of representative art as essentially illusory. Earlier in Browning’s poem the Prior criticises the realism of Fra Lippo Lippi’s painting, exclaiming: ‘Faces, arms, legs and bodies like the true/As much as pea and pea!’[3]  Of course, a representation cannot be as like its referent as two real peas. A painting of a pea must be two dimensional and even a sculpture of the pea must be of a different material, probably harder than the original and of a different texture. Even supposing appearances were identical, they would certainly not taste the same! The ‘trompe de l’oeil’ that allows Ruskin to write about marks on canvas as animated humans with histories, futures and thoughts is intrinsically and enduringly intriguing and pleasurable. Second, the production of art involves looking at reality in a new way and, arguably, with a view that the reader will also be forced to look again at the familiar in a more intense and pleasurable way.  Finally, art intensifies our experience of reality by its own limitations. In seeking to express or create things beyond the nature of a particular artistic medium, the observer/reader’s attention is paradoxically drawn to precisely those aspects of reality.

In the quotation above, Browning highlights the great discovery of Russian Formalism: the things which art renders new and ‘better’ to the observer are often precisely those things ‘we have passed/ Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see’. According to Shklovsky, ‘habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war’[4]. His verb graphically suggests that material and even human surroundings are not only dulled to our perception, but actually engulfed and annihilated by familiarity. Scholars like Shklovsky suggest that we do not actually perceive familiar objects with the full extent of our observational capacity, we only recognise them. Thus,

‘The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception.’[5]

If the technique of art is defamiliarisation, this must involve the artist him/herself seeing things in an unfamiliar, new and strange way. In the Victorian period, this way was articulated by John Ruskin in The Elements of Drawing. In a footnote to defend his assertion that in nature there are no outlines, he explains perhaps his most famous theory of painting. He argues that excellent painting is really a matter of perception: ‘The whole technical power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the innocence of the eye; that is to say, a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of colour, merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify’[6]. The implication is that ordinary recognition interprets and actually distorts what is really perceived by the ‘innocent’ eye.

Whereas, for the Russian Formalists, such perception was an end in itself, for Gerard Manley Hopkins to take pleasure in reality was to appreciate God and his creation. Close perception was then a religious act. He was deeply suspicious of writing poetry as an occupation suitable for a priest, and thus it seems no coincidence that when he did write and was most comfortable with his writing, he attempted to discern the ‘grandeur of God’ which with the world is ‘charged’. In his journals, even when resolves to write ‘no verses in Passion week or on Fridays’[7] in a gesture of pious self-discipline, he can be found making unrelated, seemingly unprovoked observations upon the world around him. From his descriptions, it does not appear that he only analysed and recorded the spectacular and unusual, but sought, in the spirit of Russian formalism, to make the habitual, astonishing. This is achieved primarily by the extraordinary connections he makes between phenomena that have no ‘real-world’ association. This metaphorical stretching takes place not only at the imagistic level – likening moonlight to a cobweb, for example[8] - but at the level of words themselves.  One of the most dramatic chains of mentally-acrobatic images can be found in a journal entry from 1866:

‘Drops of rain hanging on rails etc. seen with only the low rim lighted like nails (of fingers). Screws of brooks and twines. Soft chalky look with more shadowy middles of the globes of cloud on a night with a moon faint or concealed… Cups of the eyes, Gathering back the lightly hinged eyelids. Bows of the eyelids. Pencil of eyelashes. Juices of the eyeball. Eyelids like leaves, petals, caps, tufted hats, handkerchiefs, sleeves, gloves. Also of the bones sleeved in flesh. Juices of the sunrise. Joins and veins of the same. Vermilion look of the hand held against a candle with the darker parts as the middles of the fingers and especially the knuckles covered with ash.’[9] p9

The disjunct images are immediately striking: rain likened to fingernails and the long list of unlikely similes for an eyelid.  The power of these similes lies in the mental effort required to bring the two images together, whereby both subject and analogue are rendered fresh and new. In order to visualize how raindrops might be like fingernails, one has to imagine an exact image of fingernails long enough that when light shines from behind them, the semitransparent material of the nail is illumined while the rest of the finger is silhouetted and dark. Both water droplets and finger nails are so familiar as to be prime candidates for Shklovsky’s deadening habitualization. They are also very different substances: one liquid and transparent, the other hard and translucent. However, drawing together these images reveals, perhaps, how they truly appear, rather than what they truly are. Even though water is ductile and fluid, a drop suspended and unmoving could appear, as Hopkins suggests, as shiny and solid as a fingernail.

The image of the illuminated hand then returns for closer inspection when Hopkins considers a hand held up before the candle. Having drawn attention to the translucent and light-catching nails, he now suggests the whole hand to be light-permeable. However, rather than describe the effect of light passing through the skin in terms which are familiar – we know the skin to be peach coloured and to glow with a more rosy hue when backlit – he treats the hand as actually transformed in colour. Indeed, he begins the sentence with the specific name of the most striking red-orange pigment used in painting. This opaque paint vividly conjures the actual colour of the translucent skin. This painterly colour is subtly transformed into an image of hot coals when it is contrasted with the ashy darkness of the knuckles and finger-middles. Through the theme of painting materials, the diverse images are woven together into a painterly perspective. Despite the insubstantial vaporous quality of the clouds, there are lent opacity and substance by the description of their ‘soft, chalky look’, while the eyelashes, which have three-dimensional substance, are rendered mere lines by the phrase ‘pencil of eyelashes’.

Among the seeming random complexity of this passage, it is perhaps the word ‘juice’ which stands out most strangely. This is a prime example of Hopkins’s dislocation, not only of images, but of words themselves. Though the watery jelly of the eyeball might be, visually, like the liquid extracted from fruit, the specific association of ‘juice’ still renders the description of the eye unfamiliar and strange. ‘Juices of the sunrise’ is even odder Perhaps visually the colour of the sunrise and, say, orange juice, might be similar, but again the specificity of the word jars and renews our image of the sky.

 By reducing everything he sees down to their most basic and anonymous formal components of colour, shape and texture, Hopkins uses the ‘innocent’, painterly eye recommended by Ruskin, and renders his objects both strange and minutely exact to the imagination. His writing style too is compressed so as to be almost impressionistic. As a painting by Monet does not exhaustively explain or recreate the subject, but provides the visual tools with disjointed, vivid strokes which the eye and mind cohere and interpret, so Hopkins gives the barest components of his images, leaving the connections to be drawn with an active effort that intensifies the visual experience. Indeed, Hopkins’s condensation of language almost amounts to an admission of the limits of language, just as the annotations he made to his sketches highlighted the limitations of drawing. It is precisely that gap between his language and the effect produced by it that makes his writing ‘better to us’ than the things he describes, some of which we have probably already carelessly passed today.

There is a sense in which reality encompasses all its representations. Reality is three dimensional, but includes two-dimensional surfaces like painting; it is aural but includes silence; it is visual but it includes blindness; it includes but is not limited to the sense of touch; it exists in motion but includes stillness. There is a sense in which any art that seeks to represent reality is fulfilled in reference to reality, just as referring the reader to the reality of fingernails and water drops fulfils Hopkins’s artistic creation. However, what happens when the subject is a representation itself?  In contrast to reality, a painting is silent and still, created with a limited colour palette. In contrast to reality, writing is non-visual, in that the writing generally conveys more than the visual marks on the page, which is why looking at a page of poetry in an unknown language would not fully realise the artistic product. Writing can attempt to evoke sound, smell, touch, sight and even taste, but these things are not inherent in the process of reading. Reading occurs in time, but that may or may not correspond to the timeframe suggested by the subject. What happens, then, when a poem is painted or a painting is written about? We will explore only the latter of these dynamics, in the work of Ruskin, yet an appreciation of the former will naturally be involved.

Ruskin appreciates the problems involved with turning a painting into a linguistic account. In his majestic work entitled Modern Painters, two artists in particular emerge as pinnacles of excellence in Ruskin’s opinion: the elder is the Renaissance artist, Tintoretto, and the younger, a contemporary of Ruskin, Turner. Yet, perhaps Ruskin is only conscious of what is missing from a linguistic description. He asserts that he ‘will not insult this marvellous picture [Tinoretto’s crucifixion] by an effort at a verbal account of it’[10]. 

Yet his description adds as much as it takes away. He observes that contrary to most renditions of the crucifixion, Tintoretto does not communicate Christ’s agony in either his expression, which is calm, nor through bodily wounds. Instead,

‘the Agony is told by this, and by this only; that, though there yet remains a chasm of light on the mountain horizon where the earthquake darkness closes upon the day, the broad and sunlike glory about the head of the Redeemer has become wan, and of the colour of ashes.’[11]

Here we can see the essential instability and multiplicity of words. In the painting there is a patch of yellow-peach colour behind Christ, around which there are dark, grey-violet clouds, but to call this ‘a chasm of light’ evokes many implications that surely cannot be inherent in the marks made by Tintoretto. Chasm comes from the Greek for ‘yawning hollow’[12], implying the action of opening and the impression of depth. It also suggests that the sky has been cracked or broken apart, which air cannot occur in reality, let alone in marks representing clouds on the walls of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Likewise, though the picture veritably features dark tones, especially towards the edges, the picture does not (could not?) directly represent an earthquake. ‘Earthquake’, then modifies the darkness in some imaginative, unexplained way, probably informed by Gospel account of an earthquake which occurred at the moment of Jesus’s death. Ruskin also introduces retrospective time into the static picture when the brightness around Jesus has ‘become’ pale. This tendency to animate a still scene is most pronounced when Ruskin goes on to describe another Tintoretto: The Massacre of the Innocents. 

He highlights a particularly dramatic part of the painting, where a woman is suspended in mid-air in front of some steps, holding a baby. A man above her is holding the feet of the infant. Ruskin renders the scene in italics, as follows:

‘she hurls herself over the edge, and falls head downmost, dragging the child out of the grasp by her weight; - she will be dashed dead in a second’[13].

In a sense, this description is deeply true to the imaginative impact of the painting. However, again, to say that she ‘hurls’ herself implies an active, forcible leap into the air which, in the context, amounts to the desperate action of suicide. From the painting it seems she has been caught as she falls through the air, but another interpretation could be that she was pushed, or tripped. In anticipating her death, Ruskin looks beyond the painting into the immediate future.

Not only does Ruskin animate the time within the scene captured, he evokes the process of painting the finished picture as well. In describing the painting of water in The Sun of Venice Going to Sea, he implicitly imagines Turner observing the real scene which he will paint: ‘A stream of splendid colour fell from the boat, but that occupied the centre only’[14]. The past tense of ‘fell’, suggests a real moment in time, beyond the painting Ruskin considers. He describes how the water, without any particular identifying feature, was yet ‘no dead grey flat paint’. In this moment, he moves from real scene to a potential painted image. The next moment, he has returned to his imagined reality, describing the water as the subject of Turner’s painting: a ‘downright clear, playing, palpable surface, full of indefinite hue’[15]. As if having accomplished the mimesis of this spectacle, Ruskin then asserts, ‘But Turner is not satisfied with this’, as if narrating the moment when Turner is about to recommence his painting and add the sense of something unseen, either the past movement of the water, or a current concealed by its stillness.

The point is not to ascertain whether or not Ruskin’s art criticism was ‘correct’ or not. As Oscar Wilde wrote: ‘Who cares whether Mr Ruskin’s views on Turner are sound or not? What does it matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and so fiery-coloured in its noble eloquence, so rich in its elaborate symphonic music… is at least as great a work of art as any of those wonderful sunsets…’[16]. It does matter, in so far as it reveals where one art-form ends and another begins. More importantly, it shows that representation can never be the secondary, analytical activity it purports to be. Rather, mimesis is inescapably creative.  In the case of ekphrasis, the different media of written and visual art require an active, artistic and inventive recreation in order to represent each other. Finally, we should note that it is the aspects of Tintoretto that gesture beyond his medium - his evocation of internal agony, the impression of movement - that fascinate Ruskin, and that it is the moments in Ruskin’s prose where he reaches beyond writing into colour and music, when Wilde finds him ‘mighty and majestic’. In this we discover that what is most powerful in art is ultimately that which cannot be captured, that which hovers at its edges and beyond.

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[1] Robert Browning, ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, Robert Browning the Major Works (Oxford 1997, 2005) p181

[2] Aristotle, Poetics, ed. G F Else (Michigan 1970) p20

[3] Browning, p178

[4] Shklovsky in Literary Theory and Criticism, Patricia Waugh (Oxford 2006) p216

[5] Ibid.

[6] John Ruskin The Elements of Drawing (London, 1857) p6

[7] Gerard Manley Hopkins, in Gerard Manley Hopkins ed. Gardener (London 196) p93

[8] ‘Moonlight hanging or dropping on treetops like blue cobweb.’  Hopkins ed. Gardener 1961 p92. The cobwebs suggest an appearance of connectedness between the branches, and of the light as thin strands where it touches the fine branches. It also magically lifts the image of the light, which the logical mind knows does not exist independently from the trees it illumines, from the dark background, giving it an independent presence and substance.

[9] Hopkins, p93

[10] John Ruskin, Modern Painters Volume II: Part III p261

[11] Ruskin MP p262

[12] http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/30870?redirectedFrom=chasm#eid

[13] Ruskin MP p264

[14] Ruskin MP p148

[15] ibid

[16] Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist, http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/ntntn10h.htm