Ruskin

‘Great’ Scott recognised Pugin and John Ruskin as influences on English architecture. Both, it has to be said, were bigots: Pugin was anti-Protestant; Ruskin was anti-‘papist’; each equated architecture with moral worth; and both argued polemically, omitting anything inconvenient to their causes.

In The Stones of Venice (1851–53), Ruskin made an extraordinary attempt to dissociate Gothic architecture from ‘popery’, trumpeting against its ensnaring attractions: ‘Romanism’, he wrote, ‘instead of being a promoter of the arts, has never shown itself capable of a single great conception since the separation of Protestantism from its side’.

One of the effects of such writing was to remove anti-Gothic prejudices among Evangelicals and Nonconformists alike: Ruskin’s polemics painted Gothic as fit to ‘frame a temple for the prayer of nations’, despite the undoubted fact that all mediæval Pointed ecclesiastical architecture was pre-Reformation, and therefore, in the past, the architectural style of R.C. churches throughout Europe. Ruskin’s advocacies for a Christian social order draped a mantle of romantic democracy over the Gothic Revival.

‘Ruskinian Gothic’ is a term connected with colour in the materials used in a building (rather than applied to surfaces), naturalistic sculpture, and Italian mediæval architecture. In his Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) Ruskin celebrated Continental Gothic, contrasting it with that of mediæval England, which he opined was thin and insubstantial, even in 13th-century examples.