ABSTRACT
This chapter critically traces Ruskin’s enumeration and defense of 19th-century Romantic aesthetic ideals with recourse to new and familiar dichotomies. His forceful and strategic distinctions between the technical and the imaginative, truth and deception, living and dead imitation, the real and the apparent, the beautiful and the ugly, the authentic and the copy, often overlap with Frank Lloyd Wright’s, though the latter was offered in defense of Organic Modernism rather than Romanticism. This chapter follows both arguments to their inevitable appeal to nature and theology in the cause of the same elusive autonomous, self-referential aesthetic ideal. Along the way, much as Ruskin tries to incorporate rather than marginalize ornamentation as his predecessors had, nevertheless, he finds himself once again at the margins, unable to internalize or externalize ornamentation, not because of ornamentation, but the aporia named by ornamentation.
