Of art, beauty and life

If you are new to Ruskin, this volume from Penguin’s ‘Great Ideas’ series is the perfect place to begin. It contains two self-contained essays, ‘The Nature of Gothic’ (from The Stones of Venice) and ‘The Work of Iron’ (a lecture he delivered at Tunbridge Wells in 1858). The two essays are short enough to be both read over in a couple of hours or so, but they cut right to the heart of Ruskin’s concerns. What do examples of good art have in common, and why should those specific qualities make them better than bad art? What is the connection between beauty and morality, and how should a well-ordered society bring them together? What does it mean to know something?  

Ruskin’s first great principle is that society should allow people to flourish as whole people, exercising all their aspects as human beings. This is something we might recognise in our own debates about how to match economic strength with that collection of all the things that make life worth living which we rather drably label “quality of life”.