[Part five of "Ruskin and Baudelaire on Art and Artist," which originally appeared in the University of Toronto
Quarterly, 37 (1968): 295-308. ![[External Link]](../../../icons2/extlink.gif)
indicates linked materials not in the original print version.]
he most important, the most interesting parallels
between Ruskin and Baudelaire are not, however, to be found in similarly complex
intluences which acted upon their literary and art theories, or even in the
point by point correspondences that occur in their writings. Rather, that two
men, so different in temperament and range of interest, should have independently
created romantic theories of art coincident at major points suggests that the
transfer of romantic poetic theory to the art of painting had to follow an almost
necessary pattern. Furthermore, that both Ruskin and Baudelaire should find
it necessary to reshape the usual romantic notion of the artist suggests the
limitations and difficulties of a romantic art theory, of which both were aware.
And that both saw a need to protect art from emotionalism and subjectivity may
have resulted from the visual nature of the art they allied to poetry; for since
both believed that painting was an art that, however imaginative, had to be
judged by visible fact, they therefore brought a conservatism to their alliance
of the arts. Another explanation, similar to the first, is that their debt to
eighteenth-century writers, particularly writers on painting, had a conservative influence on their poetic theory. For whatever combination of causes,
these writers found it necessary to modify the emotionalistic
bases of their art theory; and, accepting a view of art which concentrated
on the nature of the artist as the focus of theoretical (and often of critical)
discussion, Ruskin and Baudelaire attempted to solve the problems of excessive
emotion by modifying the portrait of the artist as an ideal man. [306]
Other Sections of "Ruskin and Baudelaire on Art and Artist"
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