A Hobby of John Ruskin
A watercolor by John Ruskin, dated 1872, depicts with absolute accuracy a detail of the southwest facade of the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence. Shapes, proportions, perspective, colors, everything is perfect, and even the most minute details are reproduced with extreme fidelity: the connections of the marbles, the chipping of the cornices, the tessellations of the facing slabs.
This perfection intrigued me. I had a photograph of the window, so I enlarged it and compared with the watercolor: perfect coincidence. Therefore Ruskin used a handheld optical camera, “photographed” the image on a sheet of paper, traced its outlines, and then colored it.
Optical cameras were used by painters such as Canaletto, Bellotto, Guardi, and Vermeer himself. Ruskin is thus in good company, but he differs because he was not a professional and created these works out of passion: a passion to represent as faithfully as possible what he loved, not the ambition to demonstrate skill. And then in any case one has to know how to do certain paintings, although he helps himself with tools.
Having done some cursory research, I have found no record of similar verifications done on other works by Ruskin, but perhaps some scholar can elaborate on the topic and give us a better understanding of how he operated. Thanks to his scrupulousness, however, we can now make a point: the watercolor very reliably documents the state of the monument in 1872, when it was fourteen centuries old, while the photograph, taken before the facade cleaning done in 2014, documents the dirt accumulated over a century and a half. Ruskin thus allows us to meditate not only on the degradation of monuments but also on the pollution of the planet.
Probably the optical chamber used by Ruskin was of this type: lightweight, detachable, and… curiosity-proof. It’s also likely that a helper kept kids and troublemakers away, and kept watch when Ruskin took a break.
Ruskin 1872
The Baptistery, Florence: Study of the Upper Part of the Right-Hand Compartment on the Southwest Façade
Watercolor and bodycolor over graphite on wove paper – 52 x 34.6 cm.
Ruskin’s work is part of a series of watercolors and drawings made on the occasion of one of his trips to Tuscany in 1872.
Credit: The Victorian Web – Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
https://victorianweb.org/index.html
Image used for scholarly or educational purposes.
Photo 2013
The photo was taken before the cleaning of the facades in the years 2014-2016. Comparison with Ruskin’s work makes it possible to identify the parts that remained original and those that were replaced, probably in the restorations of 1939-42.
