Context 159 - May 2019

C O N T E X T 1 5 9 : M A Y 2 0 1 9 53 Notes from the chair My inner Berger is sitting on the fence In 1973 I attended an Oxford party on a Salters Steamer. As we departed from Folly Bridge, I was introduced to someone, was asked what I did, and we started chatting about architecture. As we glided past the college barges along MeadowWalk, Thomas Deane’s Meadow Building at Christ Church was visible through the trees. The name Ruskin was mentioned and, with all the impetuosity of youth, I ventured an opinion, only to discover that I was talking to a fellow of Something-or-Other College who was currently writing a book on Ruskin. I now know, as perhaps I should have then, that the world of Ruskiniana is a complex one. The term ‘polymath’ has been subject to some pejoration in recent years, being often used to mean jack-of-all-trades; but it can truly be applied to Ruskin as the breadth of his scholarship was prodigious. Ruskin left an enormous œuvre, both artistic and written, and a very considerable archive. Taken with the facts that his sometimes inconsistent views developed throughout his career, that his interests ebbed and flowed, and that the many critical evaluations of his legacy have been tinged with the preoccupations of successive generations, Ruskin needs to be the subject of meticulous scholarship and not merely glib party generalisations. Ruskin was one of the original opinion formers in the conservation world and, in case you missed it, 8 February 2019 was the bicentenary of his birth. Consequently this year promises a bumper crop of publications, events and exhibitions. One such exhibition, John Ruskin: the power of seeing, at 2 Temple Place, London, deals with just one Ruskinian attribute: the imperative of carefully observing landscape, nature, art and architecture in its minutest detail in order to have full understanding of it. Much of the material in the exhibition comes from the Guild of St George’s Ruskin collection in Sheffield. It includes Ruskin’s own meticulously detailed drawings of plants, minerals, landscapes, buildings and architectural features. While I was in the exhibition, there was a group of primary schoolchildren aged about nine, equipped with clipboards and magnifying glasses. They had been told to focus on something that interested them with their magnifying glass and to draw it. There was huge variety of what they selected, but in no case anything that I had particularly noticed for myself. Ruskin’s point proven, I think! One of my favourite buildings is Palladio’s Villa Poiana, at Poiana Maggiore, near Montagnana. On my first visit in 1981, on a whistle- stop tour of Palladian villas, it was empty, open and obviously at risk, as were several other villas of his at the time. I was carefully photographing the building and its details when I noticed someone sitting quietly in the shade by the rusticated brick gateway. This was an American architectural student on the same mission as me but taking three months over it rather than three days, on a bike rather than in a car and with, instead of a camera, a sketch block as thick as a lectern bible. A very Ruskinian approach to the Ruskinian anathema that Palladio represented. In our conservation work, we need to try to find time for detailed analysis like this because it is necessary for clarity in what it is we are trying to conserve. The Ruskinesque view of conservation is a preservationist one that led ultimately to the formation of both SPAB and the National Trust. His architectural values, The Seven Lamps, were largely moral ones (he was not an architect). It is The Lamp of Memory that most influenced his attitude to conservation: the simple age of something is its principal significance, with all the aura that age might be said to imbue. Those of us engaged in practical conservation must be much more nuanced than this.While there is much to be said for Ruskin’s view that proper maintenance is the key to the preservation of monuments as it removes the need for restoration (another anathema of his), this is often as helpful as shutting the door after the horse has bolted. But we must not lose sight of Ruskin’s point and allow the historic interest of a place to be lost because we have not appreciated all the features that make it special. For most of my career conservation has taken a largely curatorial approach. But in recent years it has tended to return to its antiquarian roots, with more emphasis on our human relationship to heritage assets.While this more subjective view, now commonly called ‘significance’, has its origins in the The Lamp of Memory , it would be wrong to assume this was an entirely original idea of Ruskin. The earliest attempts at a theory of art in English were by Sir Joshua Reynolds in his Discourses, which were originally his speech-day lectures to the