This chapter establishes the visual basis of Ruskin’s travelling. Though it was part of an epochal shift from the early Grand Tourist’s search for ‘ discourse’, including foreign languages and conversations with eminent persons, to the emphasis on visual observation which Adler writes about, it aims at far more than the sightseeing enabled by an eye ‘deliberately disciplined to emotionally detached, objectively accurate vision ... ‘ (Adler, 1989: 18). It offered rather an interpretative scheme, extending from a focus on realist perception, which became the consistent method Ruskin followed in his cultural criticism and the travellers’ guides he produced late in his career. Thereby he intended to counter the avoidance and neglect of serious aesthetic experience which characterised modern tourism, and also the superficiality which then and consistently in that industry, Urry claims, has become one of ‘the implications that places are visually consumed’ (Urry, 2005: 19).

Visual Representation

Ruskin’s central role as an art critic made him a specialist in seeing. He came to judge that his early years, when his parents’ supervisory regime had denied him a wide field of visual stimulus, had helped to produce his exceptional ‘thirst for visible fact’, and had developed ‘that patience in looking, and precision in feeling, which afterwards, with due industry, formed [his] analytic power’ (Ruskin, 1956–1959: 51). For him the primary medium is the visual, because, from his empiricist perspective, it is the hinge between sensation and idea, the material and the intellectual. His journals and notebooks all contain the mixed media of notes, descriptions, drawings and sketches, as his finished works of art and architectural criticism are illustrated with prints which are an integral part, indeed often the clearest expression, of their purpose. The chief original exemplar had been the composite text of Rogers’s and Turner’s Italy, but Ruskin was both writer and artist of his own works.