Ruskin, Vernon Lee, and the cultural possession of Italy

Abstract

Charlotte Bronte told her publisher that the first volume of Ruskin's Modern Painters (1843) had prompted a visual epiphany. Hitherto, she said, "I have only had instinct to guide me in judging of art; I feel now as if I had been walking blindfold - this book seems to give me eyes." Bronte's belief that Ruskin - or the "Graduate of Oxford", the pseudonym he had used - had taught her to see differently was in keeping with Ruskin's desires to raise the education of the eye to the centre of moral pedagogy, to teach the principles of proper, faithful sight. The world of the visual arts looked differently to Charlotte Bronte after reading Modern Painters I, and readers throughout the century shared her reaction to the influential power of Ruskin's prose on the nature of their perception. Edith Wharton recalled reading Ruskin in her father's library, and likewise her memory was of his influence on visual discernment. "His wonderful cloudy pages", she said, thinking of Keats, "gave me back the image of the beautiful Europe I had lost, and woke in me the habit of precise visual observation."