foreign manuscript writing on my gold ring band

Long-standing moral and religious objections to colour because of its dangerously sensual appeal, one element in the English Protestant distrust of visual arts since the fifteenth century, lingered in Sir Joshua Reynold’s influential Discourses on Art (1769–1790). Footnote 3 Eighteenth-century philosophers like John Locke and Bishop Berkeley considered colour a secondary quality, potentially misleading the mind in its efforts to grasp the more reliable facts of form. Colour was, in fact, a site of difficulty for English painting in general and for Ruskin in particular. Nothing is simple in Ruskin’s words of praise for Rossetti as a master of colour, however. Rossetti’s work, as I shall argue in this chapter, posed for Ruskin what we might call a test case for the power of colour as an emotional or moral force, conveying facts about the scenes and figures depicted but also possessing a special power to compel belief. In these arts, as in Rossetti’s watercolours, colour is not subordinated to linear or three-dimensional form it seems to exist almost as an end in itself. Rossetti, Ruskin saw, relied on juxtapositions of strong colours in maximum saturation in a system derived not from modern academic oil painting (as taught in the schools of the Royal Academy) or from a century of English watercolour practice, but from older painters, especially Venetian, or, as he here indicates, from the nameless illuminators of medieval manuscripts and makers of stained glass. What was Rossetti’s system of colour? In the watercolours of the late 1850s to which Ruskin refers, Rossetti applied his colours unusually thickly, not in pale layered washes, the usual practice for English landscape watercolourists, but in dense passages of almost dry pigment. And he was, as I believe is now generally admitted, the chief intellectual force in the establishment of the modern romantic school in England’ (xxxiii.269). ‘Rossetti’, he elaborated in 1883, ‘added to the before accepted systems of colour in painting, one based on manuscript illumination, which permits his design to rival the most beautiful qualities of painted glass, without losing either the mystery or the dignity of light and shade. What was it, then, about Rossetti’s paintings that recalled to Ruskin the power of those early Italian painters to compel his belief in the reality of biblical story? Rossetti’s power, Ruskin decided, lay in a use of colour that owed less to current or immediate past practice than to other and earlier examples. Rossetti preferred to paint from his imagination the truths he explored were as much psychological and emotional as scriptural, even or especially when he portrayed religious subjects. Rossetti, as Ruskin well knew, never really embraced either the scrupulous realism of his fellow Pre-Raphaelites-John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt-or the Protestant evangelical beliefs that guided Hunt particularly to use art to convey the typological truths of Christian history.

That Ruskin should praise Rossetti as an artist whose ‘material veracity’ could compel belief in the life of Christ might seem surprising. Rossetti’s colour led Ruskin, almost despite himself, to accept colour as a moral and emotional force in the sacra conversazioni of old and new art. Rossetti, Ruskin wrote, was the moving genius behind ‘the sternly materialistic, though deeply reverent, veracity, with which alone, of all schools of painters, this brotherhood of Englishmen has conceived the circumstances of the life of Christ’. Was colour, as eighteenth-century English philosophers argued, secondary to form, suspect for its sensual appeal? Or was it, as Ruskin had proposed in the second volume of Modern Painters, part of a typological language signifying redemptive love? His excitement over colour in the Old Masters in Italy, and his ambivalence regarding the harshly realistic colours of the English Pre-Raphaelites, changed when he discovered Rossetti’s watercolours of Dante and the Virgin Mary. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s (1828–1882) watercolours posed for John Ruskin (1819–1900) a test case for the validity of his responses to colour.

Foreign manuscript writing on my gold ring band