Gothic as Leaf, Gothic as Crystal: John Ruskin and Wilhelm Worringer

Abstract

John Ruskin and Wilhelm Worringer shared an idée fixe: the Gothic. If we read the Formprobleme der Gotik (1911) by the German art historian, comparing it with The Nature of Gothic, the approach of the two books coincides in many points. First of all, they are both discursive texts, not overtly scientific — in the tradition of rigorous artistic historiography — yet capable of exerting a deep influence far beyond the specific discipline,2 combining the theoretic with the intuitive. Ruskin and Worringer strive towards an intuition of the essence of Gothic. Both extend the concept of Gothic style from an artistic category to a spiritual category (Ruskin’s ‘gothicness’,3 Worringer’s ‘secret Gothic’4): a definition which is irreducible to its mere historical medieval limits, and is polemically opposed to the Classic, and which is able to blow ‘like a wild north wind’,5 even along the more remote paths of art history. Both employ Gothic as a key to reading their own historical time — for Ruskin Victorian England, for Worringer expressionist Munich — and finally as a vehicle for the manifestation of their poetics.KeywordsOrganic WorldTrue MissionArtistic CategoryMental TendencyGerman IdiomThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.