ABSTRACT
Ruskin's archenemy, the aesthetic movement painter James McNeill Whistler, signaled the break with referential meaning in art when he defended his nocturnes as "an arrangement of line, form, and color first," in his celebrated libel suit against Ruskin in 1878. Whistler's pronouncement had been anticipated by Algernon Charles Swinburne in his 1866 essay on William Blake; Swinburne declared that art should never be the "handmaid of religion, exponent of duty, servant of fact, pioneer of morality." Similarly, Walter Pater diminished the narrative import of art when he defined aesthetic criticism in his preface to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) as the expression of impressions of beauty which should be experienced, not analyzed. Aesthetic criticism ushered in the modern era of art appreciation represented by the formalist criticism of Clive Bell and Roger Fry in the early years of the twentieth century.
