ABSTRACT

John Ruskin was one of the most prolific and influential commentators on Italian art and cultural history in nineteenth-century Britain. Like so many of his contemporaries, he wrote about Italy past and present partly as a way of imaginatively accessing and critiquing contemporary social and cultural issues in Britain. Ruskin's support for Italian liberation was never entirely unequivocal, and he held that 'Italy's true oppression is all her own', but he felt strongly enough to write publicly in 1859 that 'the time is come at least to bid her be free, if she has the power of freedom'. Ruskin is famous chiefly for his evocations of past ages on the basis of a symbolic reading of their art and architecture. This chapter examines some of the ways in which Italy, so eloquent of the accretions and depletions of time, was a focus for Ruskin's most brilliant imaginative excursions on the subject of history, and also for his most profound anxieties.