MDMD 18th Century Madness & Gothic

[David Morris]

http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0236.html

In the mid-nineteenth century interest in the Illuminated Manuscript was 
revived by John Ruskin. Ruskin saw the ornately decorated pre-print books 
produced by monastic scribes as examples of the Gothic, an aesthetic Ruskin 
championed as providing the artistic fulfilment lost in the age of mass 
production. The medieval mode of production, Ruskin argued, provided the 
artisan with an opportunity for individual expression; the artisan 
contributed not simply his labour power, but his expertise and aesthetic 
sensibility. As a result, the Gothic represented a kind of high water mark 
in artistic production.

Like Blake, Ruskin felt the illuminated book was a means to political and 
spiritual reform, a way of breaking with the capitalist mode of production 
which took the means of artistic production out of the hands of the 
individual and placed it in the hands of the factory owner:

It is with a view [...] to the re-opening of this great field of human 
intelligence, long entirely closed, that I am striving to [...] revive the 
art of illumination, properly so called; not the art of miniature-painting 
in books, or on vellum [...] but of making writing, simple writing, 
beautiful to the eye, by investing it with the great chord of colour, blue, 
purple, scarlet, white and gold, and in that chord of colour, permitting the 
continual play of the fancy of the writer in every species of grotesque 
imagination [...]. (96)


>From: jbor <jbor at bigpond.com>
>
>Terrance wrote:
> > The term "Gothic" has three main connotations: barbarous, like the 
>Gothic tribes of the Middle Ages—which is what the Renaissance meant by the 
>word; medieval, with all the associations of castles, knights in armor, and 
>chivalry; and the supernatural, with the associations of the fearful, the 
>unknown, and the mysterious.
> > On the TV program I heard that the word gothic was used in the 
>derogatory to describe certain architecture during the 17th and 18th 
>century--the Goths being the Germanic tribes that invaded Rome.
>
>That would be Gothic Revival or Neo-Gothic architecture, such as the Houses 
>of Parliament, and much colonial architecture here, and it also 
>incorporates landscape design: hahas, follies, mazes, fake ruins etc. Faked 
>Gothic, in other words. An offshoot of Romanticism and "the Sublime".

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