INTRODUCTION TO THIS VOLUME

Summary

The second volume of Modern Painters, published in 1846, which is printed in the following pages, was “not meant,” says Ruskin, “to be the least like what it is.” It is also in many ways unlike the first volume, published three years earlier. Instead of a defence of the moderns, we hear now the praise of the ancients. Whereas the closing paragraphs of the first volume are an exhortation to truth in landscape, those of the second are a hymn of praise to “the angel-choir of Angelico, with the flames on their white foreheads waving brighter as they move.” There is in both volumes a note of enthusiasm, but it is directed in the second to a different subject, and this difference cannot wholly be accounted for by the development of the author's scheme. The diversion from “ideas of truth” to “ideas of beauty,” would not alone, or necessarily, have led us from Turner's later pictures to “an outcry of enthusiastic praise of religious painting.” Again in style, both volumes are marked by eloquence, but the eloquence of the second is in a different key. The object of this introduction is to trace, as far as possible in Ruskin's own words, the course of his history and the development of his interests between the first volume of Modern Painters and the second.