SOURCE: "John Ruskin and the Character of Male Genius," in Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism, University of North Carolina Press, 1990, pp. 117-29.

Thus far I have said little about John Ruskin, England's leading critic of the visual arts at midcentury and a presence unavoidable for a young man beginning a career as a critic of art in the 1860s. The following chapter considers the contribution that Ruskin made almost despite himself to the reflections on the character of artistic genius that culminate in Pater's essay of 1869 on Leonardo da Vinci. Pater's decision to present a self-consciously perverse model of aesthetic creativity in that essay brings to a coherent conclusion the debate that Ruskin wages with himself and others on the place of desire in artistic production.

Starting with his self-styled religious unconversion in 1858, Ruskin's art criticism begins to converge with the classicizing and humanistic tendencies that characterize advanced art and criticism, especially in the work of the Pre-Raphaelites, during the following decade. Beginning with his reflections on genius in a book that Pater read, Modern Painters V, Ruskin attempts to devise a secular artistic norm capable of harmonizing the different, and at times competing, claims of body and spirit. The achievement of such harmony becomes the telos of a new, secular ideal of art. In contrast to Arnold's antagonism to this ideal, expressed in his assault on Heine in "Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment," Ruskin identifies himself with the aspirations of younger artists and writers, with whom he associated during these years. That he does so against the odds and ultimately to his grief indicates yet more clearly his courage. Moreover, the inclusiveness of his humanism lends light and warmth to the effort on behalf of rural and industrial laborers that he likewise undertakes in the 1860s and later.

Although these tendencies in fact predate 1858, Ruskin's willingness to abandon claims of a divine telos in cultural production exposed him to a combination of acute pressures from which he increasingly came to suffer during the decade. For one thing, there were continuing debates with family and friends over the validity of Christian belief. For another, he found himself no longer able to ignore his needs for personal intimacy, needs that focused, inappropriately, on a young girl named Rose La Touche. Ruskin's infatuation with her spelled unhappiness and illness for both. Most significantly for the present discussion, he had occasion to be reminded in 1858 that the lives of artists, including his exemplar, J. M. W. Turner, showed not harmony but disharmony and that they produced works of art marred by sensuality and bearing the marks of moral and mental disease. Accordingly, Ruskin's ideal of artistic harmony carries with it a parasitical counterideal in which genius is almost inevitably linked with sexual irregularity and mental aberration.

The character of genius is not simply an academic matter for Ruskin, who worried with reason about his own physical and mental health during these years. By 1870 he even found himself charged with "madness" in a letter that his former wife sent to Rose's mother. Yet the argument that he wages with himself reflects views being articulated in the general culture. At this point, the fact that for Ruskin what counts is male genius becomes a relevant factor. As Elaine Showalter has pointed out in The Female Malady, during the nineteenth century the meaning of insanity was strongly coded in terms of gender. In women, insanity was regarded as a product of bodily difference originating in the peculiarities of the reproductive system; in men, however, insanity was regarded as a product of the increasing demands that modern progress exacts on the nervous system. As a doctor writes in 1857: "In this rapid pace of time, increasing with each revolving century, a higher pressure is engendered on the minds of men and with this, there appears a tendency among all classes constantly to demand higher standards of intellectual attainment, a faster speed of intellectual travelling, greater fancies, greater forces, larger means than are commensurate with health."

In the 1860s, however, the assurance that insanity was a sign of modernity was undermined by the advent of psychiatric Darwinism, which "viewed insanity as the product of organic defect, poor heredity, and an evil environment." The leader of the new group, Henry Maudsley, who published his first book, The Physiology and Pathology of Mind, in 1867, argued that insanity was both symptom and effect of degeneration of the species. Although one could use Darwinist arguments in a contrary way by arguing that geniuses exemplify variations necessary if the species is successfully to adapt, the implications of psychiatric Darwinism were not positive either for men generally or for artists in particular. Since writers also argued that sexual vice, especially masturbation, was both a cause and an effect of mental degeneracy, signs of sexual nonconformity on the part of artists were especially ominous.

Ruskin, alas, discovered such signs in himself as well as in Turner and other artists. As for Pater, by deciding to celebrate Leonardo's perversity, he attempts on the one hand to convert the perceived disabilities of sexual nonconformity into sources of cultural growth. Simultaneously, he counters the climate of opinion established by Maudsley and other medical experts. Psychiatric Darwinism could be and was used to aggrandize a new profession while enforcing demands for social conformity. By 1896, the year following the Wilde trials, Maudsley himself realized that things had gone too far. "The concept of degeneracy … had become an ideological weapon, a 'metaphysical something' stretched to 'cover all sorts and degrees of deviation from an ideal standard of feeling and thinking, deviations that range actually from wrong habits of thought and feeling to the worst idiocy, and some of… which are no more serious marks of morbid degeneracy than long legs or short legs, long noses or short noses." Because French writers on Leonardo had already detected sexual irregularity in his work, he provided an especially good instance for Pater to consider.

During the Long Vacation of 1869, during which Pater wrote "Notes on Leonardo da Vinci," Ruskin was appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford. In London on March 9 and 15 of the same year, he had delivered the lectures on Athena in Greek mythology that were published in June in revised form under the title The Queen of the Air. The highly personal approach that he takes in these lectures demonstrates "that myths must discover an answering sensibility in their interpreter as he constructs, deconstructs and reconstructs the matrix of their hieroglyphs." Although other Victorian writers respond similarly to Greek myth, both Ruskin's text and Pater's, published in November in The Fortnightly Review, share a common concern with the myth of Medusa, a figure that has special appeal to a number of the Pre-Raphaelites and their associates: to Swinburne, for instance, whose serpentine women may have been a major influence on The Queen of the Air, to D. G. Rossetti; to Simeon Solomon; and to Hopkins, among others. Ruskin himself had helped to prompt this attention by his discussions of Medusa in Modern Painters V(1860). And Swinburne, in turn, admired The Queen of the Air (1869).

Ruskin's study of Athena brings to an end a decade in which he emerges as a social and political prophet, in which despite his continuing use of biblical language, he publicly moves away from orthodox Christian belief, and in which he promotes a body-centered and aestheticized version of humanism. This process takes as point of departure 1858, the year in which he met Rose, then aged ten, and in which he experienced the shock of discovering Turner's erotic drawings, drawings that Ruskin took to be signs of mental derangement. To his later regret, he agreed to witness the destruction of these works. Since Ruskin had based his early career on celebrating Turner as the greatest of modern painters, the discovery had major implications for his thinking about the character of artistic imagination, reflections that issued two years later in the statement m Modern Painters V that "his [i.e., man's] nature is nobly animal, nobly spiritual—coherently and irrevocably so.… All great art confesses and worships both." During summer of 1858 Ruskin also underwent what he later referred as his unconversion. Standing before Veronese's painting The Queen of Sheba before Solomon in the Royal Gallery at Turin, Ruskin was struck by the contrast between Evangelical asceticism and, as he says in his diary, "the Gorgeousness of life which the world seems to be constituted to develop." By advocating social and economic reform; by associating himself with younger members of the Pre-Raphaelites, including Swinburne, whom Ruskin met, read, and corresponded with; and by his ill-advised preoccupation with Rose, to whom he proposed marriage in 1866, Ruskin attempted to put his new ideal into effect.

During the 1860s, Ruskin's relationship with Rose, whose mental health deteriorated over a number of years, beginning with attacks in October 1861, was something of an" 'open secret.' " As Van Akin Burd points out, Ruskin discussed and wrote about the matter to a number of friends and acquaintances. For him, the relation was connected both with his ambivalent rejection of dogmatic Christiantiy and his likewise ambivalent acceptance of physical delight. As he remarks to Charles Norton in December 1862: "I've become a Pagan, too; and am trying hard to get some substantial hope of seeing Diana in the pure glades." Ruskin quarreled about religion both with Rose's parents and with Rose herself, for whose benefit he includes attacks on Christianity in The Queen of the Air. As he writes in April 1869, to one correspondent: "There's a word or two here and there which only p [ = Rose] will understand." This text, which is particularly rich in its representation of feminine figures, is also remarkable for its display of masculine gender anxieties, evident in the contradictory, shifting, and overdetermined interpretations of figures like Athena and Medusa.

In the chapter on rain clouds in Modern Painters V, Ruskin explains Medusa as the personification of the towering cumulus cloud seen in approaching thunderstorms: " 'Medusa' (the dominant), the most terrible. She is essentially the highest storm-cloud; therefore the hail-cloud, of cold, her countenance turning all who behold it to stone. ('He casteth forth His ice like morsels. Who can stand before His cold?') The serpents about her head are the fringes of the hail, the idea of coldness being connected by the Greeks with the bite of the serpent, as with the hemlock." In this context Ruskin celebrates Medusa, associating her with the immanent presence of a divine masculine principle as imaged in the words of the psalm. Associating her later in the chapter with the "noblest thoughts" of Turner, he finds the painter portraying "the Medusa cloud in blood" (7:18) in an angrily prophetic work that Ruskin owned for a number of years, Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhon Coming On. Medusa haunts Ruskin's imagination during the decade. In 1862 he writes in a state of depression to Charles Eliot Norton: "I … try to feel that life is worth having—unsuccessfully enough.… I sometimes wish I could see Medusa." Subliminally recalling both Medusa and Turner's painting, a year later he writes again: "I am still… tormented between the longing for rest and for lovely life, and the sense of the terrific call of human crime for resistance and of human misery for help—though it seems to me as the voice of a river of blood which can but sweep me down in the midst of its black clots, helpless. What I shall do I know not—or if dying is the only thing possible."

The reference to Medusa occurs within the tradition of nineteenth-century poetic representations of her that I examine in greater detail in the following chapter. In the poem by Shelley, "On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery," that stands at the head of that line, Medusa is conceived in a positive way as a trope of political and social revolution. Ruskin's identification of Medusa with the storm clouds suggests an affinity with, even an influence from the poem by Shelley, whose work Ruskin often cites and whom he praises at the end of Modern Painters V. Shelley wrote the Leonardo poem concurrently with a poem that Ruskin cites, the "Ode to the West Wind," in which the storm-bearing west wind carries with it the seeds of social and political revolution. In the letter to Norton, the driving winter rains, Shelley's "Wild Spirit," is metamorphosed into a menstrual flood in which Ruskin himself may drown.

Despite the fact that he identifies himself with her justified anger, Ruskin's Medusa also signifies the almost-wished-for extinction of a gendered self, gendered because Ruskin, already dispirited by his romantic entanglement with Rose, mingles with it a specifically male bourgeois fear of social disorder. In this secondary context, Medusa, contaminated by the image of the bloody river of popular revolt and revenge, becomes the negative trope that Catherine Gallagher has argued Medusa is for nineteenth-century men overcome by fears of an uncontrollable female generative power. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, "the sexually uncontrolled woman … becomes a threat to all forms of property and established power. Her fierce independence is viewed, even by revolutionaries, as an attack on the Rights of Man."

Although there is no direct evidence that Pater knew about Ruskin and Rose, Ruskin's talkativeness about the subject suggests that gossip is likely to have reached his younger contemporary. Moreover, autobiographical allusiveness is evident in a number of Ruskin's texts during the 1860s. Pater had means of access to Ruskin's psychological state through conversation with Swinburne and Solomon. Ruskin, who shared the details of his private life with Sir Henry Acland, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, asked him to arrange a meeting with Swinburne as early as 1858. In 1866 and 1867, Ruskin also confided in the young Pre-Raphaelite painter, Edward Burne-Jones, who was a friend of both Swinburne and Solomon. Ruskin even hired Swinburne's friend, the sexually "ambiguous" Charles Augustus Howell, as a clandestine go-between with the La Touches in 1866.

Ruskin's connection with Swinburne in the 1860s is an important one. Having read a draft manuscript of Poems and Ballads as early as 1863, he wrote gleefully to Lady Trevelyan in December 1865: "I went to see Swinburne yesterday and heard some of the wickedest and splendidest verses ever written by a human creature. He drank three bottles of porter while I was there. I don't know what to do with him or for him—but he must not publish these things." Obtaining possession later of the manuscript of the anti-Christian "Hymn to Proserpine," Ruskin regarded Swinburne as a valuable ally in the battle against Evangelical Christianity. When Poems and Ballads came under attack in 1866, Ruskin wrote on Swinburne's behalf to his father. He also refused to support the efforts of those who wished to have Swinburne's publisher prosecuted for obscenity. There is evidence, moreover, that Ruskin also drew Swinburne's poetry into his own growing obsession. He took Atalanta, "the maiden rose" of Atalanta in Calydon, to be a type of Rose La Touche. As well, chillingly and even before Rose's early death, Ruskin "greatly admired" Swinburne's "Before the Mirror," in which a suicidal, female Narcissus-figure "is repeatedly described as—and sees herself in the reflection as—a rose"; the poem ends with her "metaphorical drowning." Even the words with which Ruskin defends Swinburne's poetry to his father suggest that the critic has conflated Swinburne's female personae with Rose: Swinburne's poetry, says Ruskin, "is diseased—no question—but—as the blight is … on the moss-rose—and does not touch—however terrible—the nature of the flower."

Ruskin acknowledges that genius, including implicitly his own, is also a diseased thing. At the end of the letter he urges: "There are sick men—and whole men; and there are Bad men, and Good. We must not confuse any of these characters with each other." Unfortunately, however, for Ruskin the terms were confused. In the public, hence reserved, reply that he sent Swinburne in return for a presentation copy of Poems and Ballads, Ruskin gives himself away more than he would like: "There is assuredly something wrong with you—awful in proportion to the great power it affects and renders (nationally) at present useless.… So it was with Turner, so with Byron. It seems to be the peculiar judgment-curse of modern days that all their greatest men shall be plague-struck." The artistic analogues—Turner, Byron, and Swinburne himself—to whom Ruskin refers connote a plague that is venereal in type.

These thoughts suggest an underside to the humanistic credo of Modern Painters V:

All art which involves no reference to man is inferior or nugatory. And all art which involves misconception of man, or base thought of him, is in that degree false and base.

Now the basest thought possible concerning him is, that he has no spiritual nature; and the foolishest misunderstanding of him possible is, that he has or should have, no animal nature. For his nature is nobly animal, nobly spiritual—coherently and irrevocably so; neither part of it may, but at its peril, expel, despise, or defy the other. All great art confesses and worships both.

In notes that Ruskin made in Turin and sent to his father, he indicates the need to accept sexual nonconformity as an aspect of "nobly animal" male artists:

Titian and Veronese are always noble; and the curious point is that both of these are sensual painters, working apparently with no high motive, and Titian perpetually with definitely sensual aim, and yet invariably noble.… And Michael Angelo goes even greater lengths, or to lower depths, than Titian; and the lower he stoops, the more his inalienable nobleness shows itself. Certainly it seems intended that strong and frank animality, rejecting all tendency to asceticism, monachism, pietism, and so on, should be connected with the strongest intellects. Dante, indeed, is severe, at least, of all nameable great men; he is the severest I know. But Homer, Shakespeare, Tintoret, Veronese, Titian, Michael Angelo, Sir Joshua, Rubens, Velasquez, Corregio, Turner, are all of them boldly Animal. Francia and Angelico, and all the purists, however beautiful, are poor weak creatures in comparison. I don't understand it; one would have thought purity gave strength, but it doesn't. A good, stout, self-commanding, magnificent Animality is the make for poets and artists, it seems to me.

Ruskin is prepared to acknowledge a necessary "animality" even in an artist like Michelangelo, whose sexual interests, insofar as they are declared by his sculpture, appear to focus on a variety of male body-types. To Ruskin, Michelangelo, in moral terms the most extreme and base of artistic types, is still of "inalienable nobleness." Moreover, Ruskin is prepared to take this view despite the fact that he perceives the eroticism of Michelangelo's portrayals of the male nude. In a phantasmagoric evocation of the artist, written while Ruskin was still in his twenties, he notes "the earth of the Sistine Adam that begins to burn" and "the white lassitude of joyous limbs," of the Bacchus, "panther-like, yet passive, fainting with their own delight, that gleam among the Pagan formalisms of the Uffizii, far away, separating themselves in their lustrous lightness as the waves of an Alpine torrent do by their dancing from the dead stones, though the stones be as white as they."

Despite Ruskin's ability to share erotic responses beyond conventional ones, in the 1860s he mainly associates himself with the Venetian masters of the female nude. In Modern Painters V, for instance, he makes Giorgione the type of the healthy artist. One would be mistaken, however, to infer that erotic aspects of Ruskin's aesthetic responses change basically between the 1840s and the 1860s. Already in Modern Painters II (1846), he shows himself charmed with Giorgione's nudes, even if at that date his delight is filtered by biblical and natural imagery: "There is no need nor desire of concealment any more, but his naked figures move among the trees like fiery pillars, and lie on the grass like flakes of sunshine". In the early 1850s and under pressure of an unconsummated marriage that ended in annulment, anxiety about his relation to images of the female body helps to inflate the negative rhetoric of works like The Stones of Venice III, in which he takes pleasure in abusing both the Renaissance, figured as a female prostitute, and Raphael, an artist closely associated with amorous power and images of beautiful women.

Ruskin's avowed conversion to the norms of Venetian art at the end of the 1850s belies a continuing anxiety. In Modern Pointers V he may oppose Giorgione to Turner as the modern, morbid artist, in part because he still found disturbing Turner's erotic drawings. In that text, Ruskin discloses his fear of female touch in the image of Venus/death that he sees haunting Turner's art: "Death.… The unconquerable spectre still flitting among the forest trees at twilight; rising ribbed out of the sea-sand;—white, a strange Aphrodite;—out of the sea-foam; stretching its gray, cloven wings among the clouds; turning the light of their sunsets into blood."

Ruskin's double attitude to the female body shows as well in the contrast between his description of a Giorgionesque nude and its illustration in the same volume. Just as with the blighted moss-rose, Ruskin in writing can delight in the decay of the original image of a female nude, the Hesperid Aeglé, that Giorgione painted in frescoes on the external wall of a Venetian palace. Ruskin speaks of "the last traces of" the image, which he had seen ten years earlier "glowing like a scarlet cloud, on the Fondaco de' Tedeschi." When he comes to reproduce the image, however, he excludes precisely the conflated signs of sensuousness, temporality, and nature that he registers in the prose. Instead and because of the wreck of the fresco, … the body below the waist is missing. At the same time, the upper portion, based on an engraving, is decorporealized.

The Hesperid Aeglé personifies the rosy western skies that both Giorgione and Turner loved. In the latter part of Modern Painters V, Ruskin identifies her with the virtues of domestic life among humble folk: "—the life of domestic affection and domestic peace, full of sensitiveness to all elements of costless and kind pleasure;—therefore, chiefly to the loveliness of the natural world." In this chapter, too, he identifies her with the color (and, in a private code, the person) Rose. In all these respects, Hesperid Aeglé is a positive manifestation of the shifting formation of clouds that at other moments is Medusa herself. In "The Hesperid Aeglé," however, he portrays Medusa as well in her negative manifestation as the Dragon of the Hesperides or as Python in the myth of Apollo and Python. And in a presentation in which Turner appears to be a virtually transparent surrogate of Ruskin himself, he sees both aspects of Medusa locked in struggle in Turner's divided self:

He is distinctively, as he rises into his own peculiar strength, separating himself from all men who had painted forms of the physical world before,—the painter of the loveliness of nature, with the worm at its root; Rose and cankerworm,—both with his utmost strength; the one never separate from the other.

In which his work was the true image of his own mind.

This final pair of images, one phallic and one vaginal, is hermaphroditic. Moreover, in a bodily code, the struggle of Apollo and Python that Ruskin describes in the preceding pages may well refer not only to Ruskin's checkered view of Turner's sexuality but to Ruskin's own youthful struggle to overcome the practice of masturbation, a struggle that came to mind as he became involved with Rose. At any rate, the climactic description of Apollo and Python, though it refers in context to the struggle against the industrial and commercial disfigurement of England, sounds like a description of struggle with bodily desires: "I believe this great battle stood, in the Greek mind, for the type of the struggle of youth and manhood with deadly sin—venomous, infectious, irrecoverable sin. In virtue of his victory over this corruption, Apollo becomes thence-forward the guide; the witness; the purifying and helpful God. The other gods help waywardly, whom they choose. But Apollo helps always: he is by name, not only Pythian, the conqueror of death; but Paean—the healer of the people."

In the passage cited above, hermaphrodeity is a symbol of the "mind" of male genius. Ruskin, however, projects the image onto female figures as well, onto Medusa, for instance, whom he associates both with Athena and with the retributive power both of Turner-as-prophet and of the male deity of Christian dispensation. Ruskin further expresses a disturbed sense of female difference in the imagery of hermaphrodeity that recurs in his dreams in 1869. "In November he dreamed of a serpent with a woman's breasts which entered his room under a door; and another which fastened itself on his neck like a leech." And in The Queen of the Air he had included similar images in a cruel assault on Rose. The nickname of Rose's mother was Lacerta, Latin for lizard. "Ruskin, writing of the serpent with which Athena was associated, had moved to the serpentine corruption of Christianity. 'And truly, it seems to me, as I gather in my mind the evidences of insane religion, degraded art, merciless war, sullen toil, detestable pleasure, and vain or vile hope …—it means to me, I say, as if the race itself were still half-serpent, not extricated yet from its clay; a lacertine breed of bitterness.' " As Burd comments: "Rose did not miss the sting, writing in the margin: '?Poor green lizards! they are not bitter: Why not say serpentine?' "

As I mentioned earlier, Pater could not help situating his work in relation to that of Ruskin. When Pater in "Diaphaneite" praises Raphael, "who in the midst of the Reformation and the Renaissance, himself lighted up by them, yielded himself to neither" [Miscellaneous Studies], he responds to Ruskin's highly publicized condemnation of the same artist in The Stones of Venice III (1853) and "Pre-Raphaelitism" (1853). Taking as his example the frecoes of the Stanza della Segnatura, in which Raphael placed a Christian subject on one wall and Apollo presiding over poets and the muses on another, Ruskin avers: "From that spot, and from that hour, the intellect and the art of Italy date their degradation.. He elevated the creations of fancy on the one wall, to the same rank as the objects of faith upon the other.… In deliberate, balanced opposition to the Rock of the Mount Zion, he reared the rock of Parnassus, and the rock of the Acropolis.… The doom of the arts of Europe went forth from that chamber." In contrast to Ruskin's tendentious claim, Pater praises the "deliberate, balanced opposition" of Christian and Classical elements in Raphael's art and outlook. As Donald Hill has pointed out, Pater contests Ruskin on the point again in "Winckelmann." And in the preface to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), Pater remarks: "Christian art is often falsely opposed to the Renaissance." Ruskin appears to have received the message, since in 1876 he writes: "Raphael, painting the Parnassus and the Theology on equal walls of the same chamber of the Vatican, so wrote, under the Throne of the Apostolic power, the harmony of the angelic teaching from the rocks of Sinai and Delphi."

By representing Leonardo in a private but accessible code, Pater participates in the hieroglyphic presentation of self that the Victorian sages often engage in but that Ruskin especially indulges in the late 1860s and in the 1870s. In "Notes on Leonardo da Vinci," Pater too reads classical and Christian icons as though they are hieroglyphs of cultural experience and takes signs of psychological and sexual instability as indices of a troubled greatness. What he adds to the approach, however, is an acceptance of sickness in the artist and culture that permits Leonardo to negotiate the anxieties about women, about the body, about genital activities, that confound Ruskin. Pater does so by acknowledging and embracing perversity, both Leonardo's and implicitly his own, a solution that has a remarkably contemporary ring to it. In his preface to Homosexualities and French Literature, Richard Howard remarks: "It was Freud who first taught us that a perversion is the opposite of a neurosis, that homosexuality, for instance, is not a problem but the solution to a problem." Although Howard may be overly sanguine as to whether or not Freud found homosexuality to be "a problem," the next point is one that Pater might have made, indeed that he does make in his study of Leonardo. Howard writes: "When we are troubled—bored, provoked, offended—by characteristic features of a writer's work (and might one not say, by characteristic behavior of a person's sexuality?), it is precisely those features (and that behavior) which, if we yield to them, if we treat them as significance rather than as defect, will turn out to be that writer's (and that person's) solution to what we mistakenly regarded as problems of composition and utterance (and character and consciousness)." Pater turns to the recherche aspects of Leonardo to arrive at a similar solution to the enigmas of his art, personality, and method of work.

As J. B. Bullen has pointed out, when Pater contends that the "beauty" of the Mona Lisa is of a kind "into which the soul, with all its maladies has passed," he affiliates himself and Leonardo with an art that is both romantic and modern. As Goethe had said: "Das Klassische nenne ich das Gesunde und das Romantische das Kranke.… Das meiste Neure ist nicht romantische, weil es neu, sondern weil es schwach, kranklich und krank ist"; Sainte-Beuve, whom Pater read, concurs: "J'appelle le classique le sain, et le romantique le malade. Les ouvrages du jour ne sont pas romantiques parce qu'ils sont nouveaux, mais parce qu'ils sont faibles, maladifs ou malade." With reference to Leonardo, Pater draws upon major French revaluations of the artist in order to portray both an artist who subverts Christian orthodoxy and one who, in the suggestion of the French, is sexually perverse. Picking up Gautier's comment of 1857 that Leonardo's figures portray "les desires reprimes, les espérances qui desesperaient" and Hippolyte Taine's remark of 1865 concerning the Louvre Saint John, "c'est une femme, un corps de femme, ou tout au plus un corps de bel adolescent ambigu, semblable aux androgynes de l'epoque imperiale," Pater bases his view of Leonardo's creativity on the painter's sexual and emotional attraction to members of his own sex. Like Taine's, Pater's Leonardo is much like that of Winckelmann, who in the History of Ancient Art singles out the artist for having portrayed Christ as a divine hermaphrodite.

Pater may also have sensed an affinity between his Leonardo and Ruskin's Turner. Both artists were great landscapists and analysts of the structure of optical perception. Both were fascinated by the powers of nature, imaged in "the motion of great waters" (Studies in the History of The Renaissance). And both associate flowing water with feminine power, in Turner by way of the yonic structure of many of his paintings. Pater himself, moreover, shares Ruskin's fascination with feminine experience, with hermaphrodeity, with Medusa herself. However, Pater's cool, analytic approach, though appropriate both in view of his fastidiousness and his exposed public position, was reinforced by the contrasting display of Ruskin's embarrassments. In discussing the Victorian sages, David DeLaura has argued their "continuous, or at least intermittent, readiness for self-exploration and self-manifestation and the manipulation of one's own personal presence for highly diverse ends." DeLaura regards Arnold's "apparent paean to Oxford" in the preface to Essays in Criticism (1865), first series, as a signal instance of such use of the self. At Oxford between 1865 and 1870, Pater drew on both "self-exploration and self-manifestation" in fashioning a novel subject-position in criticism. Given the delicacy and risks of the venture, he is liable to have been appalled at the confessional outpourings of that other great figure, John Ruskin. In view of possible analogies between Turner and Leonardo, the prominence of Medusa in the myth making of both Pater and Ruskin, and Ruskin's visibility at Oxford after he became Slade Professor of Fine Art there in 1870, Pater is likely to have regarded his precursor and rival as a leading example of how not to interfuse cultural critique with personal self-revelation. In this regard, the Leonardo essay, even more so in revised form in the 1877 edition of The Renaissance, makes sense as an attempt to bring under conscious control elements that remain evidently contradictory in Ruskin's life and work after his public conversion to humanism. Pater's emphasis on the self-conscious exploration of sexual perversity indicates a less alienated sense of sexual difference than Ruskin's, together with a will to analyze and govern experience. In the study of Leonardo's perversity, Pater resolves the sort of antinomies that in the 1870s were to undo Ruskin. This positive evaluation of perversity shows a way out of an impasse like Ruskin's and at the same time provides Pater with an opportunity to distance himself from the older man's antithetical frame of mind and disabling moralism. From 1871 to 1878, Ruskin in the letters of Fors Clavigera attempts to take the lead in a movement of social reform and experimentation called the Guild of Saint George. In the letters too he refers to Rose, openly and covertly, again and again. Pater likely discloses his sympathetic recoil, in light both of these texts and of gossip at Oxford, in a passage that he adds to the essay in the second edition of The Renaissance (1877). There he describes Ludovico Sforza, Leonardo's former patron and sometime ruler of Milan, inscribing Infelix sum ("I am unfortunate") in arabesques on the walls of his prison cell. Ludovico traces these words along with images of "vast helmets and faces and pieces of armour" (The Renaissance). Pater speculates that the images may recall Leonardo's drawings for a colossal statue of Ludovico's father. They suggest an outsized masculine ambition, which Pater also divined in the author of Fors Clavigera and in the critic who celebrated the sexual vigor of artists like Rubens and Titian, yet whose writings often write large an acknowledged unhappiness.