Part of the Façade San Michele Lucca 1845

John Ruskin made this watercolor of a section of the façade of San Michele in Lucca, and he chose the medium deliberately. Watercolor, unlike oil paint, lends itself to capturing a sense of place, a fleeting moment of light and atmosphere. Ruskin, an advocate for the Gothic style, admired its basis in craft. He saw it as an antidote to the alienation of industrial labor. The stonework he depicts here, with its carved capitals and intricate friezes, represented for him the ideal of a pre-industrial society, where workers were closely connected to the materials they used. Watercolor, too, demanded a kind of directness and skill, as it is unforgiving. Ruskin would have seen parallels between his own artistic practice and the craftsmanship he celebrated in architecture. For him, both were forms of honest labor, a way of connecting with the world through making.