Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: variegated stone, the quantity is unlimited, the kinds innumerable ; where brighter colours are required, let glass, and gold protected by glass, be used in mosaic—a kind of work as durable as the solid stone, and incapable of losing its lustre by time—and let the painter's work be reserved for the shadowed loggia and inner chamber. This is the true and faithful way of building ; where this cannot be, the device of external colouring may, indeed, be employed without dishonour ; but it must be with the warning reflection, that a time will come when such aids must pass away, and when the building will be judged in its lifelessness, dying the death of the dolphin. Better the less bright, more enduring fabric. The transparent alabasters of San Miniato, and the mosaics of St. Mark's, are more warmly filled, and more brightly touched, by every return of morning and evening rays ; while the hues of our cathedrals have died like the iris out of the cloud ; and the temples whose azure and purple once flamed above the Grecian promontories, stand in their faded whiteness, like snows which the sunset has left cold. XIX. The last form of fallacy which it will be remembered we had to deprecate, was the substitution of cast or machine work for that of the hand, generally expressible as Operative Deceit. There are two reasons, both weighty, against this practice : one, that all cast and machine work is bad, as work ; the other, that it is dishonest. Of its badness I shall speak in another place, that being evidently no efficient reason against its use when other cannot be had. Its dishonesty, however, which, to my mind, is of the grossest kind, is, I think, a sufficient reason to determine absolute and unconditional rejection of it. Ornament, as I have often before observed, has two enti......

In The Two Paths, Ruskin connects his theories of art with economic and practical life. The central theme of Ruskin’s theories of art was that contented individuals—working within a just society and striving to capture the essence of nature—produce fine and noble art, while corrupt and despondent individuals—working within an unjust society and relying on the tools of the machine age—produce inferior art. Ruskin's essays anticipate and complement theoretical approaches by critics such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer.

Offering a reconsideration of the rhetorical tradition from a visual perspective, this Prospects in Visual Rhetoric Critical Edition is the only edition of The Two Paths currently in print. The introductions and annotations were designed to facilitate critical discussions of Ruskin's theories of art, his role as a social reformer, his visual rhetoric, and the historical/political contexts of his work. The editor's notes define names and cultural allusions in the text, which also includes all appendices and Ruskin’s own introduction and illustrations....

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