Ruskin’s Taste in Spenserian Women: Not Looking at the Renaissance

John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice (1851–53) is suffused with Spenser’s Faerie Queene. This essay proposes that Ruskin’s view of Spenser’s allegorical women repeats and intensifies an aesthetic experience that The Faerie Queene models: the view of a woman in which one looks at her but does not see. Since The Stones of Venice aligns active feminine sexuality with the Renaissance itself, Ruskin thus, by means of Spenser, offers a periodized aesthetics in which the medieval allows us not to see the Renaissance, no matter how much it comes into our view.