Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture

Ruskin gave these seven lectures at Oxford in Michaelmas term 1870, during his first year as the university’s first Slade Professor of Fine Art, and published them in 1872 behind a preface dated late in 1871. He opens with the division of the arts, then works through idolatry, imagination, likeness, and structure before reaching Greek carving and the school of Athens, closing by setting Michelangelo beside Tintoret. The odd title, roughly “ploughs of Pentelicus,” pairs the ploughshare with the marble quarried near Athens, because Ruskin wanted sculpture understood as honest labour on stone rather than decorative skill. What a people carves, he argues, exposes what it believes. Exacting and opinionated throughout, and built on close looking at Greek coins, vases, and statues.