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Modern Painters, Volume 4

by John Ruskin

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Pages: 336

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About this book

The shape of a mountain matters to John Ruskin as both a natural fact and a problem for painters. In Modern Painters, Volume 4, he studies mountain beauty through rock structure, contours and the effects of light. Turner provides a recurring example in this work of art criticism. Ruskin's preface explains his preference for directing readers toward nature and drawings rather than making reduced copies that lose details of the originals.

The chapters connect the picturesque and topography with peaks, crests, precipices, banks and stones. In a detailed discussion of Mont Blanc, the angle of rock layers helps explain how mountain slopes take their form, while torrents and glaciers shape rounded banks. Ruskin also compares mountain crests with the curves of feathers in a wing drawn by Durer.

About the author

John Ruskin

John Ruskin (1819-1900) was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era and an influential social thinker whose ideas on art, labor, and society shaped movements from the Pre-Raphaelites to the welfare state.