"Ruskin's Optical Thought: Tools for Mountain Representation"

In this paper, after providing a survey of Ruskin’s criticism on his “visual thought”, I draw attention to an optical tool, “the pane of glass”, that Ruskin had theorized in his early writings on architecture (Poetry of Architecture) as a technical implement to faithfully reproduce the natural datum in drawing. This instrument, which has never been taken into critical account, and that has an antecedent in L.B. Alberti’s use of the “veil” as a transparent surface for architectural reproduction, constitutes, as I argue, a pivotal point in his early formulation of mimetic representation. It underlies his descriptions of Turner’s vignettes in Modern Painters, as a major “lens” through which Ruskin first approaches the subject of the treatment of mountain sceneries.