Victorian Synthesis of Enlightenment and Decadence Ruskin’s Reading of Turner’s Paintings and Myths

Abstract

Victorian Synthesis of Enlightenment and Decadence: Ruskin’s Reading of Turner’s Paintings and Myths Around the middle of the nineteenth century, the word transitional was much approved in terms of both theoretical and practical aspects. A Victorian thinker and critic, John Ruskin (1819-1900) discovers that what reanimates myth and its symbolic significance is not so much orthodox belief, but an imaginative perception of the natural phenomena to which myths and symbols originally refer. For Ruskin, the revision of mythical images into language is the task of the imaginative artists and also of the critics. Ruskin’s critical interpretation of Turner’s paintings focuses on the language of colours, images, natural symbolism, and myth referring to the Victorian moral and spirit as well as his own artistic values. Ruskin’s study of nature and myths in Turner’s paintings conveys the phenomenological origin of symbolic language, not only in a metaphorical sense but also in actual environmental aspect. Modern interpretation of Turner tells that his paintings are in short the study of nature and light. Though Ruskin himself did not take up this word, it is in a sense environmental thinking through which he conceives nature as the origin of language. Furthermore, Ruskin’s mythopoeia of the sun indicates the complexity of the Victorian cultural and social contexts. The modern questions such as self and other, and problems of gender identity are embedded in such complex features of Ruskin’s mythology. The fundamental paradox of Ruskin’s mythology is seemingly chaotic, but synthetic. Ruskin’s exploration of myth as regards arts and nature presents a Hegelian synthesis that is drawn equally from tendencies of retrospection towards to a prehistoric mode of life and the futuristic move open to idea of the progress of human beings.