“Strange Aphrodite”

Abstract

This chapter brings to a close the argument of the first part of the book through an analysis of the social crises Ruskin discovers in the works of Joseph Mallord William Turner. Ruskin gave the name “the English death,” to the grim combination of economic and military violence and social indifference characteristic of the nineteenth century, which he finds at the heart of the achievement of his preeminent modern painter. According to this account, even Turner’s most beautiful landscape is shaped by the boyhood experience of urban poverty that determined the painter’s sensibility, and which fitted him to capture the melancholy forms of alienation and suffering in reaction to which the experience of nature derives its force. This chapter puts Ruskin’s claims about the formal evidence of the sources of the painter’s sensibility in relation to later theoretical and artistic attempts to represent the relationship between material conditions and the reactions they provoke. Returning to the split form of Raphael’s Transfiguration and looking forward to arguments about historical crisis in Walter Benjamin and Jacques Rancière, it proposes the recognition of the power of material conditions driving both the nineteenth-century painter and his major critic by highlighting a number of linked displacements that have been difficult for criticism to address: not just the sophistication of the political work entailed in the creation of beautiful objects in the nineteenth century, but the complex forms of solidarity and social analysis that may be discovered in the critical work of the period