Revista Rua

Proposta de revisão epistemológica da teoria da Arquitetura de John Ruskin
A proposal of epistemological revision of John Ruskin's theory.

Claudio Silveira Amaral

 

But the picturesqueness is in the unconscious suffering, the look that an old labourer has, not knowing that there is anything pathetic in his grey hair, an withered arms, and sunburnt breast, and thus there are the two extremes, the consciounsness of pathos in the confessed ruin, which may or may not be beautiful, according the kind of it, and the entire denial of all human work being gone through all the while, and no pity asked for, nor contempt feared. And this is the expression of the Calais spire, and of all picturesque things, in so far as they have mental or human expression at all. I say, in so far as they have mental expression, because their merely outward delightfulness – that makes them pleasant in painting or in the literal sense,picturesque – is their actual variety of colour and form. A broken stone has necessarily more various forms in it than a whole one, a bent roof has more various curves in it than a straight one, every excrescence or cleft involves some additional complexity of light and shade, and every stain of moss or eaves or wall adds to the deligntfulness of colour .[13]
           
É em razão de fundar a composição sobre uma noção de forma retirada do horizonte da pintura que Ruskin sobrepôs uma apreensão estética pitoresca à dimensão verbal. A composição ruskiniana é uma composição pitoresca, em que as partes estão a serviço da expressão da totalidade, captada pelo sentido da visão. Como exemplo dessa definição Ruskin citou o fenômeno do pôr do sol,
 
I speak especially of the moment before the sun sinks, when his light turns pure rose-colour, and when this light falls upon a zenith covere with coutless cloudforms of inconceivable delicacy, threads and flakes of vapour, which would in common daylight be pure snow-white,and which gives therefore fair field to the tone of light. There is then no limit to the multitude, and no check to the intensity of the hues assumed. The whole sky from the zenith to the horizon becomes one molten, mantling sea of colour and fire, every black bar turns into massy gold every ripple and wave into unsullied shadowless, crimson and purple, and scarlet, and colours for which there are no words in language, and no ideas in the mind, - thing which can only be conceived while they are visible -, the intense hollow blue of the upper sky melting through it all – showing here deep and pure and lightless, their modulated by the filmy,  formless body of the transparent vapour, till it is lost imperceptibly in its crimson and gold. ”[14]
 
Para Ruskin, seria o artista, através de sua arte, o propagandista dessa verdade natural. Ela surgiria em decorrência de estados de contemplação, os quais se constituem em apreensões de sensações transmitidas por um objeto a um espectador. A verdade só poderá ser apreendida, segundo ele, a partir de uma primeira impressão, ou seja, no primeiro contato visual[15].

[13] RUSKIN, J. Modern Painters, 1856, V. 4, p. 7.
[14] RUSKIN, J. Modern Painters, 1848, V. 1, p. 158.
[15] “…and that he only did right in a kind of passive obedience to his first vision, that vision being composed primarily of the strong memory of the place itself which he had to draw and secondarily, of memories of other places (whether recognized as such by himself or not I cannot tell) associated with the new central thought.” RUSKIN, J. Modern Painters, V.4, p.28.