Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture: Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870Ruskin, John
Philosophy
Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture: Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870
Ruskin, John
Sculpture
209. In preceding lectures on sculpture I have included references to
the art of painting, so far as it proposes to itself the same object as
sculpture, (idealization of form); and I have chosen for the subject of
our closing inquiry, the works of the two masters who accomplished or
implied the unity of these arts. Tintoret entirely conceives his figures
as solid statues: sees them in his mind on every side; detaches each
from the other by imagined air and light; and foreshortens, interposes,
or involves them as if they were pieces of clay in his hand. On the
contrary, Michael Angelo conceives his sculpture partly as if it were
painted; and using (as I told you formerly) his pen like a chisel, uses
also his chisel like a pencil; is sometimes as picturesque as Rembrandt,
and sometimes as soft as Correggio.
It is of him chiefly that I shall speak to-day; both because it is part
of my duty to the strangers here present to indicate for them some of
the points of interest in the drawings forming part of the University
collections; but still more, because I must not allow the second year of
my professorship to close, without some statement of the mode in which
those collections may be useful or dangerous to my pupils. They seem at
present little likely to be either; for since I entered on my duties, no
student has ever asked me a single question respecting these drawings,
or, so far as I could see, taken the slightest interest in them.
210. There are several causes for this which might be obviated--there is
one which cannot be. The collection, as exhibited at present, includes a
number of copies which mimic in variously injurious ways the characters
of Michael Angelo's own work; and the series, except as material for
reference, can be of no practical service until these are withdrawn, and
placed by themselves. It includes, besides, a number of original
drawings which are indeed of value to any laborious student of Michael
Angelo's life and temper; but which owe the greater part of this
interest to their being executed in times of sickness or indolence, when
the master, however strong, was failing in his purpose, and, however
diligent, tired of his work. It will be enough to name, as an example of
this class, the sheet of studies for the Medici tombs, No. 45, in which
the lowest figure is, strictly speaking, neither a study nor a working
drawing, but has either been scrawled in the feverish languor of
exhaustion, which cannot escape its subject of thought; or, at best, in
idly experimental addition of part to part, beginning with the head, and
fitting muscle after muscle, and bone after bone, to it, thinking of
their place only, not their proportion, till the head is only about
one-twentieth part of the height of the body: finally, something between
a face and a mask is blotted in the upper left-hand corner of the paper,
indicative, in the weakness and frightfulness of it, simply of mental
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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