Praeterita (Oxford World's Classics) by John Ruskin

Author:John Ruskin [Ruskin, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2012-10-05T04:30:00+00:00

CHAPTER VI

THE CAMPO SANTO*

104. THE summer’s work of 1844, so far from advancing the design of ‘Modern Painters,’ had thrown me off it—first into fine botany, then into difficult geology, and lastly, as that entry about the Madonna shows, into a fit of figure study which meant much. It meant, especially, at last some looking into ecclesiastical history,—some notion of the merit of fourteenth century painting, and the total abandonment of Rubens and Rembrandt for the Venetian school. Which, the reader will please observe, signified not merely the advance in sense of colour, but in perception of truth and modesty in light and shade. And on getting home, I felt that in the cyclone of confused new knowledge, this was the thing first to be got firm.

Scarcely any book writing was done that winter,—and there are no diaries;* but, for the first time, I took up Turner’s ‘Liber Studiorum’* instead of engravings; mastered its principles, practised its method, and by spring-time in 1845 was able to study from nature accurately in full chiaroscuro, with a good frank power over the sepia tinting.

I must have read also, that winter, Rio’s ‘Poésie Chrétienne,’ and Lord Lindsay’s introduction to his ‘Christian Art.’* And perceiving thus, in some degree, what a blind bat and puppy I had been, all through Italy, determined that at least I must see Pisa and Florence again before writing another word of ‘Modern Painters.’

105. How papa and mamma took this new vagary, I have no recollection; resignedly, at least: perhaps they also had some notion that I might think differently, and it was to be hoped in a more orthodox and becoming manner, after another sight of the Tribune.* At all events, they concluded to give me my own way entirely this time; and what time I chose. My health caused them no farther anxiety; they could trust my word to take care of myself every day, just the same as if I were coming home to tea: my mother was satisfied of Couttet’s skill as a physician, and care, if needed, as a nurse;—he was engaged for the summer in those capacities,—and, about the first week in April, I found myself dining on a trout of the Ain, at Champagnole; with Switzerland and Italy at my feet—for tomorrow.

106. Curiously, the principal opposition to this unprincipled escapade had been made by Turner. He knew that one of my chief objects was to see the motives of his last sketches on the St Gothard; and he feared my getting into some scrape in the then disturbed state of the cantons. He had probably himself seen some of their doings in 1843, when ‘la vieille Suisse prit les armes, prévint les Bas Valaisans, qui furent vaincus et massacrés au Pont du Trient, près de Martigny;’1* and again an expedition of the Corps Francs of the liberal cantons ‘pour expulser les Jesuits, et renverser le gouvernement,’* at Lucerne, had been summarily ‘renversée’* itself by the Lucernois, 8th December, 1844, only three months before my intended start for the Alps.

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