ABSTRACT
Despite Ruskin's claims that Modern Painters was written from purely dis interested motives, free from 'zeal for the reputation of any individual' or 'personal feeling of any kind' (3.3), the work is not solely a treatise on the principles of art or an apotheosis of Turner. As Ruskin's polemic against the 'shallow and false' contemporary periodical criticism intimates, there was a political dimension to his entry into the art critical arena. Ruskin's exposure of the sterility of the traditional academic principles of art to which the conservative critics of Blackwood's Magazine and the Athenaeum still clung, was an extension of the middle-class attack on traditional sources of power into the realm of the aesthetic. His purpose is implicit in the full title of Modern Painters - 'Modern Painters: Their Superiority in the Art of Land scape Painting to the Ancient Masters'. He was engaging in a political strug gle which had been reflected in the periodical press during the early decades of the nineteenth century, when radical publications such as the Examiner championed living artists as the source of 'an exalted public taste',1 and the London Magazine was urging that 'blind respect for antiquity' should be
replaced with 'the study of Nature'.2 As Terry Eagleton has perceptively commented: 'the category of the aesthetic assumes the importance it does in modern Europe because in speaking of art it speaks o f . . . other matters too', for example 'freedom and legality, spontaneity and necessity, selfdetermination, autonomy, particularity and universality', matters which are 'at the heart of the middle class's struggle for political hegemony'.3
