FROM DEAD END TO CENTRAL CITY OF THE WORLD: (RE)LOCATING ROME ON RUSKIN'S MAP OF EUROPE

Abstract

The habit of observing and recording carefully, in words and in drawing, the works of God in nature and of man in art made travel essential to the process of continual rediscovery which characterizes the work of John Ruskin, causing him to repeatedly redraw his map of Europe. In 1840–1, the young man's Evangelical upbringing and antipathy for the classical inhibited his response to Rome, which remained peripheral to the monumental volumes of the mid-century. Shifting religious views and studies of ancient myth prepared the way for two revelatory visits to Rome in the early 1870s. In Oxford lectures, Ruskin read in Botticelli's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel syntheses of oppositions between schools of art, between the natural and the spiritual, Greek and Christian cultures, Catholic faith and Reforming energies. He also came to feel the ‘power of the place’ in holy places of early Christianity and in continuities of peasant life. Rome is therefore relocated as ‘the central city of the world’, but modern realities menaced this vision. What had been an impoverished backwater was undergoing massive redevelopment and industrialization as the capital of a newly unified state with international ambitions. From these changes, commented on in his monthly pamphlet, Fors Clavigera, Ruskin extracted severe lessons for Victorian Britain. This article is about the ways in which the two types of change interact.