5/18/2023 0 Comments Beyond the Veil by Janet E. MorrisExpanding on the ecology of the earth veil Ruskin depicts it variously as ‘a carpet’, as ‘a fantasy of embroidery’ of ‘tall spreading of foliage’ with the ‘unerring uprightness as of temple pillars’ all cleaving to the underlying strength of rock or transient sand. Following his acknowledged ‘master’ Ruskin, William Morris writes in News from Nowhere (1892) of ‘the spirit of the new days, of our days’ as a ‘delight in the life of the world intense and overweening love of the very skin and surface of the earth, on which man dwells, such as a lover has in the fair flesh of the woman he loves’. And Ruskin opens his fifth volume of Modern Painters (1860) with this preeminent surface, ‘The Earth-Veil’: ‘The earth in its depths must remain dead and cold, incapable except of slow crystalline change but at its surface, which human beings look upon and deal with, it ministers to them through a veil of strange intermediate being’. For John Ruskin, the first surface of Venice-his amphibious ‘sea-dog of towns’-was naturally not that of architecture itself, but the protean ‘salt-smelling skin’ of the sandy earth whereupon it arose.
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