Ruskin and Viollet-Le-Duc

University of Michigan Press
Chapter Title: Figures of Ruin and Restoration: Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc
Book Title: Architecture and Modern Literature

Book Author(s): David Spurr
Published by: University of Michigan Press. (2012)
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4
Figures of Ruin and Restoration:

Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc
The two most prominent architectural theorists of the nineteenth cen-

tury—Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and John Ruskin, both champi-
ons of the Gothic—held diametrically opposed ideas on the question of
architectural restoration. Viollet-le-Duc devoted a successful career to
restoring many of France’s great architectural monuments of the Middle
Ages and wrote extensively in defense of his practices. Ruskin, on the
other hand, abhorred restoration of any kind, and defended the aesthetic
value of ruins. The reason for this difference in architectural doctrine has
been put down to one of temperament between the rational architecte de
terrain and the eccentric Oxford aesthete. However, in attempting to go
beyond these stereotypes, I have found that the question of architectural
restoration rather quickly opens out onto a wider ‹eld of inquiry that in-
cludes the relation of nineteenth-century architecture to the other arts.
My approach to these two writers will propose the notion that the oppo-
sition between an aesthetics of architectural ruin and one of restoration
bears comparison with another burning issue in nineteenth-century art:
the opposition between allegory and symbol. At the same time, I will sug-
gest that both of these oppositions are symptomatic of a condition mark-
ing the advent of modernity: its complex and unstable relation to the his-
torical past.
The aesthetic of ruins in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth cen-
142
Figures of Ruin and Restoration ✦ 143
turies needs to be understood as part of the emerging distinction between

the ‹gures of allegory and symbol, as de‹ned by romantic critics such as
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Georg Friedrich Creuzer. At the risk of cov-
ering some familiar territory, allow me to recall some of their formulations.
Coleridge introduces the distinction between allegory and symbol in order
to show that the latter concept is the proper way to read the Bible, against
the “dead letter” of literalism or the “counterfeit product of mechanical
understanding” (6:30). For Coleridge, “an allegory is but a translation of
abstract notions into a picture-language, which is itself nothing but an ab-
straction from objects of the senses” (6:30). A symbol, on the other hand,
uni‹es the material object with the metaphysical, between the phenome-
non and its essence. Coleridge thus speaks of “the translucence of the Eter-
nal in and through the Temporal” as the symbolic mode that transfuses the
entire Bible, while Creuzer speaks of the instantaneousness, totality, and
unfathomable origins of the symbol (cited in Benjamin, Origin 166). The
unity of the symbol is above all temporal: eternity manifests itself in the in-
stantaneous.
It is useful, however, to understand these theories not only in their ro-
mantic formulations but also in their rede‹nitions by a twentieth-century
theorist such as Walter Benjamin. Coleridge sees allegory, in its purely con-
ventional relation between the sensible and the abstract, as only an arti‹cial
and degraded form of the symbol; but it is something else entirely for Ben-
jamin. In the Origin of German Tragic Drama (1925), Benjamin overturns the
romantic primacy of the symbol in favor of allegory. For him, allegory is the
‹gure that rigorously refuses the sublimation of the Fall, resists the illusory
reconciliation of the temporal with the eternal, and insists on the ontologi-
cal difference between the object and its meaning. Benjamin offers an em-
blematic image of this aesthetic of negation and difference.
Während im Symbol mit der Verklärung des Unterganges das trans-

‹gurierte Antlitz der Natur im Lichte der Erlösung ›üchtig sich offen-
bart, liegt in der Allegorie die facies hippocratica der Geschichte als er-
starrte Urlandschaft dem Betrachter vor Augen. (Ursprung 343)
Whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the trans‹gured face of
nature is ›eetingly revealed in the light of redemption, in allegory the ob-
server is confronted with the facies hippocratica [death face] of history as a
petri‹ed, primordial landscape. Everything about history that, from the
very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a
face—or rather in a death’s head. (Origin 166)
144 ✦ architecture and modern literature
This is a powerful ‹guration of the two opposing rhetorical ‹gures, and in

each case there ‹gures a face (ein Antlitz). In the symbol, it is the face of
nature that is trans‹gured, its destruction idealized by the light of re-
demption (Erlösung) from the metaphysical realm. In allegory, no such re-
demption takes place; the face is instead that of history, and its counte-
nance consists of the petri‹ed features of the death’s head. The death’s head
is, in other words, the allegory of allegory, the ‹gure of the allegorical rela-
tion that insists on the death of the past, on the temporal distance between
signi‹er and signi‹ed, on the ontological difference between the natural
and the spiritual.
Paul de Man, who has pushed this distinction as far as seems possible,
de‹nes it quite clearly.
Whereas the symbol postulates the possibility of an identity or

identi‹cation, allegory designates primarily a distance in relation to its
origin, and renouncing the nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it es-
tablishes itself in the void of this temporal difference. (Rhetoric 207)
De Man speaks here of the inauthentic or false nostalgia that seeks to re-
live the past by abstracting it from any historical reality. Allegory, on the
contrary, is without illusion and inconsolable; based on the principle of
disunity and discontinuity in its form of representation, it marks a perma-
nent exile from the past and in this way acquires for the modern world a
kind of authenticity that is lacking in the symbol.
For Benjamin, allegory is to the realm of thought what ruins are to the
realm of things. In both cases, the rupture between the material signi‹er
and the ideal signi‹ed appears irreconcilable. The parallel traditions of al-
legory and ruin come together, however, in the fragment, a ‹gure both lit-
erary and architectural. Benjamin likens baroque writing to the process of
ceaselessly piling up fragments, as opposed to a more organic model of lit-
erary creation, so that “the perfect vision of this new [literary] phenome-
non was the ruin” (178). Baroque writing is “constructed” (baut), a quality
that the writer does not attempt to conceal under the sign of genius or
heavenly inspiration. “Hence the display of the craftsmanship that, in
Calderón especially, shows through like the masonry in a building whose
rendering (Verputz) has broken away” (179). The recurring image here is
one of brokenness and fragmentation, both in the relation of the parts of
the composition to one another and in the relation of the composition to
its ostensible origin. According to Benjamin, this notion of an irreconcil-
able rupture lies at the heart of the cult of ruins in the baroque aesthetic of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for ruins testify to the irre-
versible effects of time even as they mark the rupture of the object with its
origins.
The aesthetic of ruins can thus be seen as an authentic nostalgia, as the
melancholy cult of the past arising out of the space of rupture, and con-
scious of the irremediable absence of its object. Diderot writes in his Salons
de 1767:
Les idées que les ruines éveillent en moi sont grandes. Tout s’anéantit,
tout périt, tout passe. Il n’y a que le monde qui reste. Il n’y a que le
temps qui dure. Qu’il est vieux ce monde! Je marche entre deux éter-
nités.
Great are the ideas that ruins awaken in me. Everything is annihilated,
everything perishes, everything passes away. There is only the world that re-
mains. There is only time that endures. How old this world is! I walk be-
tween two eternities. (Quoted in Mortier 94)
What perishes is history and its transcendental meaning; what remains are
merely the physical existence and temporal phenomena of the world. The
two eternities between which Diderot walks are not those of heaven and
hell; they are those of the void stretching out before and after life. These
re›ections belong to the more general baroque cult of ruins as a cult of ab-
sence. As Jean Starobinski describes it:
La ruine par excellence signale un culte déserté, un dieu négligé. Elle

exprime l’abandon et le délaissement . . . Sa mélancolie réside dans le
fait qu’elle est devenue un monument de la signi‹cation perdue. Rêver
dans les ruines, c’est sentir que notre existence cesse de nous appartenir
et rejoint déjà l’immense oubli. (180)
The ruin par excellence is the sign of a deserted cult, a neglected god. It ex-
presses abandonment and desertion. . . . Its melancholy lies in the fact that
it has become a monument to lost meaning. To dream in the ruins is to feel
that our existence no longer belongs to us, and that it is already part of the
immense oblivion.
In speaking of the dreamlike aspect of the aesthetic of ruins, Starobinski

reminds us that, even if ruins are seen as testimony to the ravages of time,
the cult of ruins should not be confused with any sort of historical realism.
He notes that “the sacrilege, in the eyes of those who remain attached to
this feeling, is to wish to date that which should remain immemorial” (181).
There would thus appear to be a historical abstraction even in the aesthetic

that sees architectural ruin as the negation of any metaphysical transcen-
dence and as the sign of the inescapable immanence of the world in time.
However, if this is one form of historical abstraction, it should not be con-
fused with that which comes into play with the aesthetic of architectural
restoration, at least as this will be put into practice by Viollet-le-Duc and
his followers. Restoration implies another kind of abstraction, a different
dream. Where the aesthetic of ruins fetishizes the marks of time, restora-
tion seeks to erase them. In this respect restoration belongs to the form of
nostalgia that dreams of the timeless unity of the object with its ideal ori-
gins—the unity of the symbol—whereas the ruin, as we have just seen, ex-
presses the temporal disunity proper to allegory. In the sense that the nine-
teenth century gave to these terms, restoration is symbolic, whereas ruins
are allegorical.
This excursion into an episode of the history of aesthetics is meant to
prepare the ground for a more direct comparison between Viollet-le-Duc
and Ruskin, as the two principal nineteenth-century apologists of archi-
tectural restoration and ruins, respectively. Viollet’s work has come under
intense criticism,1 but we nonetheless have him to thank for the fact that
many of the most important buildings of medieval France remain more or
less intact today. He began his career of restoration in 1840 with the
twelfth-century Basilica of Vézelay in Burgundy. In the same year, with
Jean-Baptiste Lassus, he undertook the restoration of the Sainte-Chapelle
in Paris. He achieved national prominence in 1844 by winning the compe-
tition to restore Notre-Dame de Paris. The projects of the basilicas of
Saint-Denis and of Saint-Sernin in Toulouse also belong to this period.
Following the fall of the July monarchy, the revolution of 1848, and the
coup d’état of Louis-Napoléon, Viollet continued to enjoy the favor of the
ruling régime. He oversaw the work of restoration at Amiens and Chartres.
In the 1850s he turned to secular architecture by rebuilding the citadel and
ramparts of Carcassonne and by restoring the Château de Pierrefonds at
Compiègne as an imperial residence. His last major architectural restora-
tion was the Cathedral of Lausanne in 1874. Apart from this extremely ac-
tive architectural career, Viollet sought to provide a theory for his practice
in several major works. We will be concerned chie›y with the Dictionnaire
raisonné de l’architecture française du XI au XVI siècle (1854) and the two
volumes of Entretiens, or “discussions,” published respectively in 1863 and
1872. Because of the rational approach to function and structural unity
taken in these works, Viollet-le-Duc has often been considered as the ‹rst
modernist architect.2 Ruskin, of course, was not an architect by profession,

but through his writings and lectures he had a profound effect on Victo-
rian ideas of art in general, and of architecture in particular. We will be
concerned mainly with his two major works of architectural theory, both
written from the experience of his voyages to Italy as a fairly young man in
midcentury: The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849); and The Stones of
Venice, published in three volumes between 1851 and 1853.
A general comparison between Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc has been
made by Nikolaus Pevsner, who remarks on several points in common be-
tween the two ‹gures: their celebration of the Gothic art of the thirteenth
century, of course, and the importance that both of them attach to a cer-
tain notion of truth in architecture in which the appearance of a building
corresponds to its actual structure and material composition. In The Seven
Lamps, for example, Ruskin tells us that the architect must avoid the sug-
gestion of a means of structural support other than the real one, as well as
the painting of surfaces to represent a material other than that of which
they are made. Likewise, Viollet-le-Duc insists in the Entretiens that “stone
appear really as stone, iron as iron, wood as wood,” and so on. (1:472).
Both writers seem to agree on the role of the people in constructing Gothic
architecture. For Viollet-le-Duc, it is to the common people of the thir-
teenth century that we owe the great monuments of that age, while for
Ruskin these buildings represent the work of an entire race (Pevsner 18). In
his last major work, The Bible of Amiens (1880–85), Ruskin several times
cites Viollet-le-Duc as an authority on French medieval architecture.
The common ground ends just about there, however, and the differ-
ences between these two ‹gures are much more signi‹cant than any points
of convergence. Viollet-le-Duc, for example, privileges architectonic struc-
ture, whereas Ruskin gives greater importance to decoration. We must
keep in mind that Viollet-le-Duc, as an active architect, is primarily con-
cerned to justify the methods he has put into practice, whereas Ruskin,
even more than a theorist, is above all a stylist and connoisseur who has lit-
tle interest or experience in the practice of building. For Pevsner, however,
the difference comes down to one of sensibility: in Viollet-le-Duc, he sees
a French rationalism that favors the concrete and empirical and in Ruskin
a supposedly English emotivity that privileges suggestion and evocation.
In this rather facile analysis, however, Pevsner reduces important aesthetic
and theoretical differences to a stereotypical view of national tempera-
ment. Let us attempt a deeper appreciation of these two theorists by look-
ing more closely at their respective ideas on ruin and restoration.
In the article on restoration in Viollet-le-Duc’s Dictionnaire raisonné,

we read:
Les travaux de restauration entrepris en France . . . ont sauvé de la ruine

des œuvres d’une valeur incontestable. . . . Ces édi‹ces, une des gloires de
notre pays, préservés de la ruine, resteront encore debout pendant des siè-
cles, pour témoigner du dévouement de quelques hommes plus attachés
à perpétuer cette gloire qu’à leurs intérêts particuliers. (31)
The works of restoration undertaken in France . . . have rescued from ruin
a number of works of undisputed value. . . . These buildings, part of the
glory of our country preserved from ruin, will remain standing for centuries
as a testimony to the devotion of a few men motivated more by the perpet-
uation of that glory than by their private interests.
This last phrase is aimed at the architects of the École des Beaux-Arts and
their supposed disdain for the practical work of restorers working in the
provinces. Viollet-le-Duc was to be associated with the École only brie›y;
appointed controversially to a professorship in 1863, he was prevented
from teaching his courses by his “classical” colleagues and students.3 For
our purposes, however, it is more important to note that for Viollet-le-
Duc, in opposition to the baroque and romantic traditions, ruins have no
value as such. On the contrary, the ruin of ancient buildings is to be
avoided at all costs because their restoration can transform them into mon-
uments of permanent and transcendent value. “The perpetual glory of the
French nation” here should be understood as a rhetorical appeal directed at
his imperial patrons in 1856 and not necessarily as an expression of Viollet’s
own political feeling, which was essentially republican. In any case, this
idealized and transcendent notion of architecture conforms to the famous
de‹nition with which Viollet-le-Duc begins his dictionary article on
restoration.
Le mot [restauration] et la chose sont modernes: restaurer un édi‹ce, ce
n’est pas l’entretenir, le réparer ou le refaire, c’est le rétablir dans un état
complet qui peut n’avoir jamais existé à un moment donné. (14)
The word [restoration] and the thing itself are modern: to restore a build-
ing is not to maintain it, repair it, or rebuild it; it is to reestablish it in a
complete state that might never have existed at any given moment.
For Viollet-le-Duc, architectural restoration was a new science, like those

of comparative anatomy, philology, ethnology, and archaeology. Laurent
Baridon has shown how the architect’s ideas incorporate the scienti‹c con-
cept of organicism characteristic of the mid–nineteenth century: the ar-
chitectural restorer is to the medieval building what the paleontologist is to
the remains of a prehistoric animal: each of them seeks to reconstitute an
organism. This theory presupposes a number of qualities in the object to
be reconstituted: its unity, its internal logic, its visibility. Like the paleon-
tologist Georges Cuvier, Viollet-le-Duc saw in the object of his study a
“correlation of organs” and the subordination of its different elements, so
that every part could be understood in terms of its function within the
overall structure. The point, however, was not merely to re-create a build-
ing by imitating medieval practices but rather to ‹nd the solutions to ar-
chitectural problems that medieval artisans would have adopted had they
had the technical means available to the nineteenth century (Baridon
18–20). For Viollet-le-Duc, medieval architecture is not essentially a mul-
tiple series of historical phenomena rooted in distinct and local contexts.
Rather, his theory implies the existence of an ideal form of the building in-
dependent of its concrete realization at any given historical moment.
In other words, Viollet-le-Duc reached into the art of the Middle Ages
for a certain number of a priori principles, an architectural grammar that
guided his projects even where the work of restoration went consciously
against the historical realities of a given edi‹ce. As the studies of Viollet-le-
Duc are full of examples of this controversial practice in his major projects,
I shall cite a relatively minor but nonetheless instructive example from his
project for the restoration of the Chapelle des Macchabées in Geneva, built
in 1405 by Jean de Brogny as an annex to the twelfth-century Cathédrale
de Saint-Pierre. The chapel had been converted into a storeroom by
Calvin’s reformers and later had been used as a lecture hall by the
Académie de Genève, today the University of Geneva. Leila El Wakil has
shown how Viollet-le-Duc, based on his own understanding of Gothic
principles, proposed the “restoration” of several elements that in fact had
never belonged to the building. Among these was the erection of a spire
that Viollet-le-Duc freely admitted might never have existed. Nonetheless,
he argued, it ought to have existed even if it never did, because such a spire
conformed to “accepted practice in all independently built chapels” (El
Wakil 52). Similarly, he proposed to create a rose window in the otherwise
intact facade of the western gable, a pure invention justi‹ed on the aes-
thetic grounds that “an intact gable over the architecture of the ground-
level story will appear overly heavy” (53). Characteristically conservative,
the city of Geneva rejected these innovative features of the project, judging
that “one should put aside those things which, while they might beautify
the building, one cannot claim to have ever existed” (54). Although Viol-
let-le-Duc withdrew from this project after an administrative disagree-
ment, the city went ahead with the restoration of the chapel on the basis of
his plans but without the spire, the rose-window, and other innovative fea-
tures. Viollet-le-Duc’s original plans are reproduced in ‹gures 5 and 6. Fig-
ure 7 shows the chapel as it appears today.
A few years later, in restoring the cathedral adjacent to the chapel,
Geneva had to fend off pressure from a very different quarter. A sense of the
intense polemic surrounding the question of restoration is given in the
of‹cial report of the Association for the Restoration of Saint-Pierre, which
took on the task of restoring the cathedral proper in 1891. Having caught
wind of the new plans, William Morris’s Society for the Protection of An-
cient Buildings had made an urgent appeal to Geneva to abandon its plans
to restore Saint-Pierre, on the grounds that any such work would destroy
the work of time and risk betraying the ideas of the original builders. Mor-
ris’s society recommended instead that the protection of the cathedral be
limited to the simple reinforcement of those parts of the building that were
falling into ruin. The response of the Geneva association was unambiguous.
Donner satisfaction à des théories aussi subversives de notre raison

d’être, c’était nous suicider; nous avons préféré vivre et répondre à nos
correspondants que nous ne partageons pas leur manière de voir.
(Fornara 104)
To give in to theories so subversive of our reason for being would be to com-
mit suicide. We preferred to live, and answered our correspondents by say-
ing that we did not share their point of view.
In other words, Geneva sought a middle way between the conservative

movement, which, following the principles of Ruskin, opposed restoration
of any kind, and the radical restorations of Viollet-le-Duc.
Viollet-le-Duc’s practice of restoring buildings from a priori principles
rather than historical evidence continues to attract controversy today. One
of his more severe critics ‹nds that his theory amounts to a “delirium”
founded on a fundamental tautology: “[His] observations allow the de‹ni-
tion of a law, but the law pre-exists, so that the observations conform to
the law” (Leniaud 91). Despite the often brilliant investigations that Viol-
let-le-Duc conducted in order to discover the history of a building, his
principles tend to make an abstraction of history in two ways. First, he ide-
Fig. 5. Viollet-le-Duc’s plan
for the restoration of the
Chapelle des Macchabées,
west face, 1875. (Musée d’art
et d’histoire, Geneva.)
Fig. 6. Viollet-le-Duc’s plan for

the restoration of the Chapelle
des Macchabées, south face, 1875.
(Musée d’art et d’histoire,
Geneva.)
Fig. 7. The Chapelle des

Macchabées, Geneva.
(Photo by Michael
Röösli.)
alizes a given period, the Gothic era, as the privileged moment of all archi-
tectural history. Second, by consciously reconstructing a building into a
form that does not correspond to any of that building’s past forms, he re-
fuses a rigorously historical approach in favor of an aesthetic of timeless
unity. Of course, one might ask how could it be otherwise, once one has
started down the path of restoration. Given a building such as Notre-
Dame de Paris, which underwent continual transformation from the
twelfth to the seventeenth centuries, how does one decide which of its
many forms to restore it to unless one has, for example, an ideal notion of
what it might have been in the thirteenth century? The point is, however,
that for Viollet-le-Duc Gothic architectural form is not primarily histori-
cal; rather it consists of an ideal unity that is structurally analogous to the
unity of the romantic symbol, even if its content is different.
By its very nature, the romantic symbol represents the secularization of
the metaphysical qualities once attributed to the sacred object. Given the
declining authority of religious institutions, the symbol responds to a de-
mand in the nineteenth century for a language that would bring material
being into harmony with spiritual being in atemporal but secular terms. In
Viollet-le-Duc the Gothic cathedral, like the romantic symbol, is secular-
ized as an aesthetic object.4 Neither his writings nor his architectural prac-
tices take seriously the status of the medieval Gothic church as an edi‹ce
designed for the ritual of worship and the administering of the holy sacra-
ments. On the contrary, he writes in the Entretiens that the great Gothic
cathedrals of medieval France are essentially the work of lay craftsmen or-
ganized into guilds. While employed by the bishops, these craftsmen
worked independently, adopting a new system of construction and new
forms in architecture and sculpture. Whereas the religious institutions of
the early Middle Ages could only reproduce designs in the Romanesque
and Byzantine traditions, the “lay school” of the late twelfth century made
a complete break from these traditions, replacing them with principles
founded on reason, that is, the principles of Gothic architecture. It is only
at this point, argues Viollet-le-Duc, that there emerges “le génie propre à
la nation française” (the special genius of the French nation) (Entretiens
1:265). From here it is a relatively short step to the national ideology that
Viollet-le-Duc invokes in support of his projects of restoration. In this way
the metaphysical dimension of the symbol, traditionally given the name of
the in‹nite, the eternal, and so on, acquires an identity rather more speci‹c
but equally eternal: the glory of France. This is a rhetorical strategy that we
might call the appropriation of the symbolic structure by ideology.
In order to understand Viollet-le-Duc’s aesthetic, we need to see it in
the context of France’s Second Empire and its ideology, which, while as-
piring to recover the imperial glories of the ‹rst Napoleonic era, nonethe-
less embraced the values of industrial progress inherited from the bour-
geois monarchy of Louis-Philippe. We see both elements in the discourse
of Viollet-le-Duc, who pays homage to Napoléon I while insisting on the
progress made in the artisanal industries of the provinces, thanks to the
works of architectural restoration under way all over France. To take up
just the ‹rst of these elements, we note that for Viollet-le-Duc, restoration
is above all a national project whose origins lie in the First Empire and “the
will of the Emperor Napoléon I, who was ahead of his times in all things,
and who understood the importance of restoration” (Dictionnaire 22). Vi-
ollet-le-Duc’s politics, however, are not a simple matter, for they suggest a
certain discrepancy between his personal convictions and his public dis-
course. If, after the fall of the Second Empire, he showed himself to be an
ardent republican, there was little to suggest such a conviction in his close
connections to the authoritarian regime of Napoléon III, connections he
needed for the support of his architectural projects. By no means the least
of these was his restoration of the fourteenth-century Château de Pierre-
fonds into an imperial residence, where his energetic direction of court en-
tertainments earned him the nickname “the stage prompter of Com-
piègne” (Gout 51).
Viollet-le-Duc’s discourse on art, however, is not predominantly royal-
ist. It is instead a texture of theories and observations that re›ects all of the
tensions inherent in mid-nineteenth-century aesthetics. This tension is ev-
ident from the very ‹rst of the Entretiens. On one hand, in keeping with
the emerging symbolist aesthetics of his age, Viollet-le-Duc argues for the
essential unity of art and its value as independent of historical circum-
stances: “Art has its value independent of the milieu in which it is born and
grows up.” On the other hand, and in keeping with the scienti‹c human-
ism of Charles-Augustin de Sainte-Beuve, Viollet-le-Duc sees the form if
not the essence of art as intimately tied to the way of life of a people: “[T]he
arts of the Middle Ages follow step by step the manners and customs of the
people in the midst of which they develop” (Entretiens 1:11). This double
discourse allows Viollet-le-Duc to argue both for an ideal Gothic, inde-
pendent of historical speci‹city, and for the revival of the Gothic as an ex-
pression of national unity and character. Thus, in the seventh Entretien,
Viollet-le-Duc claims that “l’art en France, dès les premières années du XI-
IIe siècle, est un instrument dont le pouvoir royal se sert pour développer
ses efforts vers l’unité nationale” (art in France, from the early years of the
thirteenth century, has been an instrument used by royal power in its ef-
forts to develop national unity) (1:282). This is not offered as a critique of
the instrumentalization of art for political ends. On the contrary, Viollet-
le-Duc is citing the precedent of the thirteenth century as an argument for
the continued support of his various projects of restoration by the imperial
regime. National unity is offered as a political justi‹cation for the pursuit
of an essentially aesthetic ideal.
Like Viollet-le-Duc, Ruskin defends the Gothic against architectural
classicism but with a very different declared ideology. For Ruskin, the in-
dividual freedom inherent in the Gothic style stands in opposition to the
authoritarian classicism of the ancien régime, while the nineteenth-cen-
tury revival of the Gothic marks a parallel revival of Christian faith, in re-
action to the declining authority of religious institutions in modern life.
When Ruskin ‹rst went to Oxford in 1836, the Oxford movement of John
Keble and John Henry Newman had already begun. It helped to create an
intellectual climate in which Ruskin could write of art and architecture in
strongly ethical terms, which, in his work, resonated with the egalitarian-
ism of the equally important political movement that produced three re-
form bills between 1832 and 1884.
Like Viollet-le-Duc, Ruskin also speaks of a national architecture, de-
claring, for example, in The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), that “all good ar-
chitecture is the expression of national life and character; and it is pro-
duced by a prevalent and eager national taste” (Library Edition 18:434). But
this national character is to be distinguished from Viollet-le-Duc’s dis-
course of national unity. For Ruskin, it is a matter of the impact of archi-
tecture on public life, of the manner in which a building becomes a per-
manent part of the landscape, and of a certain ethical responsibility of the
architect toward the people. The monumental character of the Gothic
building resides in its capacity to bear witness to the history of a people,
which it does through the richness of documentation contained in its or-
namentation.
Its minute and multitudinous sculptural decorations afford means of
expressing, either symbolically or literally, all that need be known of
national feeling or achievement. . . . Better the rudest work that tells a
story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning. (8:229–30)
Already we may note two points on which Ruskin’s discourse differs from
Viollet-le-Duc’s. First, although he speaks of feeling and national achieve-
ment, Ruskin does not privilege any nation in particular. Where Ruskin
af‹rms the style and the moral force of what he calls the Goth (the English-
man, the Frenchman, the Dane, the German) against the supposed languor
and subjection of Mediterranean peoples, his use of nation is essentially racial
in the nineteenth-century sense and has little to do with the meaning given
this word by the nationalism of the modern state. Second, Ruskin wishes to
af‹rm the memorial function of the Gothic building: if poetry constitutes
what a people has thought and felt, then architecture constitutes “what their
hands have handled, and their strength wrought, and their eyes beheld, all
the days of their life” (8:224). For Ruskin, the Gothic building has the same
aura that Benjamin will attribute to the work of art that still bears the marks
of the artist’s hands, a quality lost in reproduction. In general, Ruskin’s no-
tion of the memorial function of the Gothic contrasts with Viollet-le-Duc’s
ideas, which are both more abstract and more pragmatic. Stephen Bayley has
remarked that in the French architect the Gothic is made into “a ›exible sys-
tem adapted to all needs and their changing nature. The Gothic describes a
language of many words” (32).
For Ruskin ruins also have a memorial function, but they are distin-
guished from other architectural formations by the quality of what he calls
“parasitical sublimity,” the sublime that derives, somewhat paradoxically,
from accident or the nonessential character of the object. This particularly
fortuitous form of the sublime corresponds, for Ruskin, to a certain sense
of the picturesque. He ‹nds it in the accessory details of a painting by Tin-
toretto or Rubens,
in the clefts and folds of shaggy hair, or in the chasms and rents of
rocks, or in the hanging of thickets or hill sides, or in the alternations
of gaiety and gloom in the variegation of the shell, the plume, or the
cloud. (8:240)
Here there is an echo of the baroque poetics of a seventeenth-century poet

such as William D’Avenant. Defending the style of his epic poem Gondib-
ert (1651), D’Avenant calls attention precisely to its ephemeral, aleatory,
and indistinct qualities, “the shadowings, happy strokes, secret graces, and
even the drapery, which together make the second beauty” (16–17). Simi-
larly for Ruskin, his sense of the sublime is independent of the main lines
and principal substance of the object as such. In architecture in particular
this fortuitous beauty, this sublime of the supplement, takes the form of
the ruin. There is, then, a sublime that resides in ruptures, ‹ssures, stains,
and moss—in everything that marks the effects of nature and of time on
the architectural work.
The striking quality of such effects had been appreciated by Hugo in
Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), where, in condemning the various attempts at
architectural restoration of that cathedral—attempts to be once more
taken up by Viollet-le-Duc in 1845—he notes that “le temps a rendu à
l’église plus peut-être qu’il ne lui a ôté, car c’est le temps qui a répandu sur
la façade cette sombre couleur des siècles qui fait de la vieillesse des monu-
ments l’âge de leur beauté” (time has perhaps given the church more than
it has taken away, as it is time that has spread over the facade that dark
color of the centuries that makes the old age of monuments the age of their
beauty) (191). Similarly, Ruskin holds that “it is in the golden stain of time,
that we are to look for the real light, and colour, and preciousness of ar-
chitecture” (8:234).
Ruskin’s own rendering of Kenilworth Castle, done in 1847 (‹g. 8),5

shows the Great Hall shorn of its roof, the crumbling masonry overgrown
with ivy. Stone and vegetation alike are subject to the variegated effects of
light and shadow. The picture retains the strong sense of verticality be-
longing to the Gothic elements of the building, but these are set in stark
contrast to a gray and empty sky. Just enough of Gothic tracery remains in
one of the windows to recall the splendor of this edi‹ce in the days of John
of Gaunt, in the fourteenth century. From reading Walter Scott’s novel Ke-
nilworth (1821), Ruskin would have known the rich descriptions of this cas-
tle as it stood in Elizabethan days. His sense of the ruin’s sublimity, how-
ever, would have come from the visible effects of time’s ravages in the
margins and interstices of the weakening stone.
According to Ruskin, Gothic architecture creates conditions that are
particularly advantageous to this external or parasitical sublime, because
the effects of the Gothic that depend on the play of shadow and light are
enhanced by the partial wearing away of sculptural detail. Ruskin de-
nounces architectural restoration, then, because it effaces the sublime ef-
fects of time. If Hugo attacks speci‹c projects of restoration on the
grounds of their incompetence or lack of architectural understanding,
Ruskin’s condemnation is more categorical and even more impassioned.
Restoration, so called, is the worst manner of Destruction. It means the
most total destruction which a building can suffer: a destruction out of
which no remnants can be gathered. . . . It is impossible, as impossible
as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beau-
tiful in architecture. (8:242)
The dominant ‹gure in this discourse is that of death. Ruskin declares the
impossibility of summoning back to life the spirit of the dead artisan and
commanding him to direct other hands and other thoughts. The very con-
cept of restoration is “a lie from beginning to end.”
You may make a model of a building as you would of a corpse, and your
model may have the shell of the old walls within it as your cast might have
the skeleton, with what advantage I neither see nor care. (8:244)
As for those monuments that fall into ruin:
We have no right to touch them. They are not ours. They belong partly
to those who built them, and partly to the generations of mankind who
are to follow us. The dead still have their right in them. (8:245)
Fig. 8. John Ruskin, Kenilworth Castle, 1847. (From Ruskin, Diaries, vol.
1, plate 31.)
It is as if ruins were still the dwelling places of the dead and that to restore
them would be to destroy the eloquent means by which the dead, or death
itself, make themselves understood.6 To declare “we have no right to touch
them” implies the kind of veneration for architectural ruins that is felt for
mortal human remains, which, for profoundly emotional and cultural rea-
sons, cannot be disinterred or displaced. This insistence on the presence of
death in ruins recalls Benjamin’s notion that the emblem of allegory is the
facies hippocratica, the pale and shriveled aspect of the human face just be-
fore the moment of death.
Ruskin’s ideas on death and ruins force us to revise the common un-
derstanding that for him the Gothic is a primarily organic art, in both its
structural principles and its resemblance to vegetation. In fact, his essay
“The Lamp of Power” ‹nds that one of the elements of sublime architec-
ture is precisely its inorganic character, found in the geometric form of the
wall and other “wide, bold, and unbroken” surfaces (8:109). Both the or-
ganic and the inorganic principles are found in nature, “the one in her
woods and thickets, the other in her plains and cliffs and waters”(8:109). If
the former “gives grace to every pulse that agitates animal organisation,”
the latter “reproves the pillars of the earth, and builds up her barren
precipices into the coldness of the clouds” (8:102).
[T]he grey cliff loses not its nobleness when it reminds us of some Cyclo-
pean waste of mural stone . . . even the awful cone of the far-off moun-
tain has a melancholy mixed with that of its own solitude, which is cast
from the images of nameless tumuli on white sea-shores, and of the heaps
of reedy clay, into which chambered cities melt in their mortality. (8:103)
As Andrea Pinotti suggests, Ruskin expresses a nostalgia for death and
mineral stillness. The language of melancholy, solitude, and mortality with
which he contemplates the mountains and cliffs belongs also to the dis-
course of ruins. In the ruin, where climbing vegetation meets the resistance
of ancient stone, we witness the same eternal struggle between the organic
and the inorganic principles of nature. The stone, in its hardness and cold-
ness, but also in its marred and worn condition, has the awesome aspect of
death itself. It evokes the melancholy, “dead” relation of the allegorical sign
to its object, in contrast to the living, organic nature of the symbol.
This identi‹cation of Ruskin with the aesthetics of allegory is bound to
surprise those who read too literally his insistence on “naturalism” in ar-
chitectural representation. There is, for example, the passage in “The Na-
ture of the Gothic” where Ruskin contrasts the representations of purgato-
rial ‹re in two different churches. The ‹rst is in the twelfth-century mosaic
of the Last Judgment in the Romanesque cathedral of Torcello, in the
Venitian lagoon. Here, the ‹re is purely allegorical. It takes the form of a
red stream that descends from the throne of Christ and extends itself to en-
velop the wicked. The other, in the Gothic porch of Saint-Maclou in
Rouen, is strongly naturalistic: “The sculptured ›ames burst out of the
Hades gate, and ›icker up, in writhing tongues of stone, through the in-
terstices of the niches, as if the church itself were on ‹re” (10:233). Ruskin
offers this as a demonstration of the “love of veracity” re›ected in Gothic
design, by which he means a faithful imitation of natural form. As always
in Ruskin, however, there is a difference between factual representation
and truth. He goes on to say that, on re›ection, one will perhaps ‹nd more
truth in the allegorical ‹gure, “in that blood-red stream, ›owing between
de‹nite shores, and out of God’s throne, and expanding, as if fed by a per-
petual current, into the lake wherein the wicked are cast,” than in the
“torch-›ickerings” of the Gothic, naturalistic ‹gure (10:233). The point is
that for Ruskin allegory represents a deeper truth than naturalistic imita-
tion. A similar point has been made by Gary Wihl, who writes that for
Ruskin, “sincerity is increasingly ‹gured as allegory, as a writer’s or sculp-
tor’s self-consciousness about the ‹ctiveness . . . of his idealizations” (113).
The allegorical ‹gure acknowledges the gap between signi‹er and
signi‹ed, and this implicit acknowledgment of the inadequacy of
signi‹cation is itself the sign of a truth.
In general, we could say that Viollet-le-Duc’s aesthetic is to Ruskin’s
what symbol is to allegory: on one hand, the timeless unity of the object
with its ideal essence; on the other hand, rupture, disunity, and the pathos
evoked by the material remains of an irrecoverable past. Here it might be
useful to point out the af‹nity between the aesthetic of ruins and that of
the monument. The monument does not claim to evoke the totality of
what it commemorates. It signi‹es its object only allegorically, and by con-
vention; it presents itself as the dead letter of a departed spirit, and its af-
fective power resides precisely in this irreconcilable ontological difference.
Ruskin’s implacable rejection of modern architecture for a long time
caused him to be seen as an incurable nostalgic, devoted to a regressive pas-
toralism in the face of modernity.7 But there is in Ruskin’s particular form
of nostalgia a certain resistance to nostalgia, just as, conversely, there is nos-
talgia in Viollet-le-Duc’s particular form of modernism. To the extent that
the work of each of these ‹gures resonates in the twentieth century, Viollet-
le-Duc’s impact is on architectural modernism, whereas Ruskin’s is on liter-
ary modernism. It is on this latter point that I would like to conclude.
The aesthetic of the ruin and the fragment will be taken up, if trans-
formed, by poets such as T. S. Eliot and René Char in their fragmentation
of the word and literary form. This textual fragmentation will be justi‹ed
in terms identical to those that Benjamin uses to justify the allegorical frag-
ment, that is, in a discourse that privileges rupture and exteriority. Thus
Maurice Blanchot writes that what he calls the parole du fragment (frag-
ment word) in Char is
un arrangement d’une sorte nouvelle, qui ne sera pas celui d’une har-
monie, d’une concorde ou d’une conciliation, mais qui acceptera la dis-
jonction ou la divergence comme le centre in‹ni à partir duquel, par la
parole, un rapport doit s’établir.
a new kind of arrangement, not of harmony, concord, or reconciliation, but
one that accepts disjunction or divergence as the in‹nite center from out of
which, through the word, relation is to be created. ( L’Entretien 453)
Other elements of Ruskin’s work can be seen as a renewal of the baroque

spirit in the modern context. There is, for example, the idea of perpetual
movement that Benjamin sees as a constituent element of baroque alle-
gory. In contrast to the romantic symbol, which remains “persistently the
same,” allegory, “if it is to hold its own against the tendency to absorption
(Versenkung), must constantly unfold in new and surprising ways” (Ur-
sprung 359; Origin 183). One can compare this remark to Ruskin’s insis-
tence on “changefulness” as one of the essential qualities of the Gothic, as
well as on its “disquietude.”
It is that strange disquietude of the Gothic spirit that is its greatness;
that restlessness of the dreaming mind, that wanders hither and thither
among the niches, and ›ickers feverishly around the pinnacles, and
frets and fades in labyrinthine knots and shadows along wall and roof,
and yet is not satis‹ed, nor shall be satis‹ed. (10:214)
That is, the Gothic spirit is not satis‹ed in its ceaseless search for a recon-
ciliation of body and spirit, of temporal and eternal, of signi‹er and
signi‹ed. This dissatisfaction corresponds to the allegory rather than the
symbol, the architectural ruin rather than its restoration, the fragment
rather than the whole. The paradox of Ruskin is that his baroque de‹ni-
tion of the Gothic gives rise to a certain modernism; in recovering a ne-
glected aesthetic of the past, he looks forward to the new forms of art an-
nounced by Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922): “These fragments I have shored
against my ruin” (Collected 69).

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University of Michigan Press

Chapter Title: Figures of Ruin and Restoration: Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc

Book Title: Architecture and Modern Literature

This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-

Figures of Ruin and Restoration:

The two most prominent architectural theorists of the nineteenth cen-

turies needs to be understood as part of the emerging distinction between

Während im Symbol mit der Verklärung des Unterganges das trans-

This is a powerful ‹guration of the two opposing rhetorical ‹gures, and in

Whereas the symbol postulates the possibility of an identity or

La ruine par excellence signale un culte déserté, un dieu négligé. Elle

In speaking of the dreamlike aspect of the aesthetic of ruins, Starobinski

There would thus appear to be a historical abstraction even in the aesthetic

modernist architect.2 Ruskin, of course, was not an architect by profession,

In the article on restoration in Viollet-le-Duc’s Dictionnaire raisonné,

Les travaux de restauration entrepris en France . . . ont sauvé de la ruine

For Viollet-le-Duc, architectural restoration was a new science, like those

Donner satisfaction à des théories aussi subversives de notre raison

In other words, Geneva sought a middle way between the conservative

Fig. 6. Viollet-le-Duc’s plan for

Fig. 7. The Chapelle des

Here there is an echo of the baroque poetics of a seventeenth-century poet

Ruskin’s own rendering of Kenilworth Castle, done in 1847 (‹g. 8),5

Other elements of Ruskin’s work can be seen as a renewal of the baroque

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