ABSTRACT
This essay examines how the theoretical background of Modern Painters and the political context of 1848 in Europe and other factors shaped Ruskin's first architectural work and distinguished it from other architectural studies of the time. It goes on to look critically at how Ruskin's ideas on architecture relate to the theoretical framework of Modern Painters II, his early theory of perception, through the faculties of Aesthesis, Imagination, and Theoria and how this shaped his writing on both landscape and the built environment. It takes a deep dive, through a close reading of ‘The Lamp of Memory’, into how this penultimate essay in The Seven Lamps is carefully positioned and framed for rhetorical effect.
