ABSTRACT
Ruskin was the first writer in English to employ the affective mode (systematically) in the criticism of works of visual art. Thanks to the stream of letters which poured back to his parents in England in 1845 we can witness day by day the way in which he was moved by the works of early art at the Campo Santo or the burial ground in Pisa, by the paintings of Fra Angelico in Florence, and by the work of Tintoretto in Venice. We can read, too, the way in which he developed a way of communicating the feelings of pleasure, excitement and awe before these works and how this mode of discourse was adopted by him in the second volume of Modern Painters. Of course he was not the first to feel or write like this and critics have often pointed to the tentative and unsystematized responses of Fuseli, Lamb and Hazlitt. But he has a more important precursor, and one who has been entirely overlooked: Coleridge.
