Ruskin, Morris and the Byzantine æsthetic

A Coptic Baptismal Procession
by Pre-Raphælite painter Simeon Solomon, 1865

The relationship of the Pre-Raphælites to the Holy Land and the Middle East is a somewhat ambivalent one. There is in the artwork that sprang from the movement, to use Said’s term with all of its various shades of connotation, an orientalist approach to the Near East. Though the Pre-Raphælite painters showed a marked preference for verdant copses and pale maidens, draped in the mists of European antiquity, one might surmise (with some degree of justice) that a sepia palette would occasionally allow the Pre-Raphælites to project various prejudices and insecurities about the Western art world onto what they may well have imagined, in their Romantic sensibility, to be something of a blank canvas. And yet, such an interpretation is never entirely fair to them, as a school.

The classical orientalism described by Said would presume a Whiggish view of world history, wherein the enlightened modern European must be portrayed flatteringly against the essentialised, emotivist-primitive-and-superstitious ‘eastern despotism’, the better to prepare the latter for the inevitable ‘uplift’ and assimilation into a European-led modernity. Yet it was precisely this Whiggish view – in both the æsthetic sense and the political one – that the Pre-Raphælites rejected outright! Though we can see traces of this kind of orientalism in Holman Hunt, there is also the countervailing force in his work of a genuine appreciation for something the Near East has that modern Europe lacks.

This tendency is even stronger in the Pre-Raphælite theorists, John Ruskin and his pupil William Morris. While the rest of polite English society looked down their noses with a mingled pity and distaste, after the fashion of Edward Gibbon (or Baron Acton), on the benighted ‘east’, Ruskin was publicly in raptures over the art which Venice had plundered from thence. To his mind, the artistic and architectural style of the Eastern Roman Empire represented a deep human truth whose integrity had been shattered by the onset of the Renaissance, which had all the character to his mind of a Satanic betrayal. Though we may assume Ruskin was genuine in his appreciation for the Eastern antiquity which peeked through in Venetian architecture, it seems reasonable to assume that it was his ‘violent Tory[ism] of the old school’ speaking when he denounced the modern turn.

William Morris may never have been as prolix as Ruskin in his admiration for the East (both Christian and Islamic), but then, he never really had to be. The Arabic-Islamic influence on his artwork, and particularly the patterned plant motifs which became his hallmark, left its own profound witness. However hostile Morris may have been, and with good reason, to the Ottoman Turks on a political level, Morris was nevertheless a devoted admirer of Islamic handicrafts, and his basic conviction that utility and beauty were in an ultimate sense not only not at odds but practically identical, seems to have resonated with the same.

To be sure, there may have been a subtler form of orientalism at play in the Pre-Raphælite treatment of the East, broadly considered. The Romantic sensibility evinced by the Pre-Raphælite artists and critics demanded a certain ‘state of innocence’ on the part of those societies deemed closer to ‘nature’, which could by turns be every bit as patronising as the ‘sloshy’ Whiggism they rejected. Though it may hold the grains of a very important truth, the sharp divide Ruskin wedges between the Eastern Roman Empire and the art of the Renaissance is… historically a bit naïve, let’s put it that way. All this having been said, though, the Pre-Raphælites indicated something critically important. That indication was not necessarily about the societies they portrayed, but instead about our own, and the debts we owe in our spiritual life to a civilisational deposit that cannot be easily glossed as merely ‘Western’. Bear in mind: these were not Orthodox Christians talking. These were Anglicans, English non-conformists and the odd cultural Catholic. Even if the point the Pre-Raphælites made was in a purely æsthetic fashion, it was still sorely needed.