Filme do Dia: Der Traum des Bildhauers (1907), Johann Schwarzer

Why then, asks Ruskin, is the nineteenth century an age in which painting seems to have less and less interest and more and more concentration on what in previous times had been merely the natural background? A medieval knight or monk looking at modern painting would ask: why do those people now spend the whole their lives making pictures of trees and clouds and bits of stones and runlets of waters, instead of gods and saints and heroes?

In the struggle to get into right relation with the universe, there are for Ruskin two opposite and yet related errors: the first "that of caring for man only; and for the rest of universe, little or not at all"; the other, "that of caring for the universe only; - for man, not at all."  It is the second, he says, which "in a measure, is the error of modern science." It is the error of modern art too, if we lose trust in ourselves and our place in the universe.

Philip Davis, The Victorians, p. 81