Looking at Tintoretto with John Ruskin. A Venetian Anthology Compiled and Edited With a Critical Introduction by Emma Sdegno

For Ruskin some dates represented turning points in his personal and working life: 23rd September 1845 is one such date. In letters written from Venice to his father that autumn he writes of being overwhelmed by the power of Tintoretto, and of feeling called to safeguard his paintings together with the fate of the city itself. Ruskin’s discovery of Tintoretto’s work plays a central role in his aesthetics, and was to inspire some of his best writing. Through Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice, works that were to be deeply influential throughout mid 19th-century Europe Ruskin contributed to the establishment of Tintoretto’s international fame in ways that still inform our ways of looking at his painting. This collection of writings appears for the first time in a well-organised form, a form that Ruskin himself had planned for English visitors. Neglected by Ruskin scholars, his “Venetian Index”, in particular, meticulously records the state of conservation of Tintoretto’s canvases at a time of neglect and conflict, surveying the artist’s oeuvre as a whole but also examining minutely individual paintings. Quintessentially Ruskinian in its investigation of the language of sacred iconography and the origins of landscape painting, this guide to Tintoretto’s painting generates interpretations which will at once urge Tintoretto scholars’ response, and prove illuminating for non-expert readers wishing to explore a great painter through the sensibility of the critic who first introduced him to the English.