'Fossil-creatures' and the 'mockeries of life':Ruskin at Verona

This article concerns the Victorian critic John Ruskin’s investments in the medieval sculpture of Verona. Over the course of repeated visits to the city, Ruskin developed a novel form of sculptural aesthetics, one based on an intuitive poetics of fossilization, fortification and ambivalent reanimation of the dead. Transfixed by his encounters with the carved griffins supporting the Duomo’s western portico, and with the elaborate constructions of the Scaligeri tombs, he discovered a unique calibration between ‘civilization’ and ‘chemical facts’: a dynamic interaction between histories of human making and the materiality of stone. Tracing Ruskin’s encounter with Veronese monuments across a variety of media and in light of his interest in geological science, the article offers a new approach to the critic’s traffic with the matter of sculpture, and its implications for understanding the medium’s aesthetic and historical life.