Lectures on Art

The lectures delivered to students in Oxford, where Ruskin founded the Department of Fine Arts, represent a peculiar quintessence of his artistic views and perspectives on both the history and the state of contemporary art. In them, he not only focuses on purely technical aspects of painting, architecture, and artistic photography, but also reflects on the complex relationships between art, science, morality, and ethics, and most importantly — for the first time in the history of art studies — he proposes a theory of art for enjoyment, and elaborates on the emergence and development of both "pure" and "mass" art.