Remarks on "the ideal in art" in some conceptions of 19th-century thinkers (J. Ruskin, H. Taine)

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Main purpose of the essay is the comparison of some refl ections by John Ruskin ("Modern Painters, Lectures on Art, Th e Stones of Venice, Sesame and Lilies, Th e Eagle’s Nest") and by Hippolyte Taine ("Philosophie de l’art, Notes sur l’Angleterre"). In Ruskin’s and Taine’s considerations literature and visual arts are treated as equivalent or corresponding tools of expressing and discovering the aesthetic and ethical beauty. Using literary metaphor and drawing on literary imagery in their statements about art appears to be not only a rhetorical strategy but also a proof of common ways of perceiving and defi ning the artistic ideal by entire generations of 19th century thinkers who, like Stendhal ("Histoire de la peinture en Italie"), searched for an intellectual element in beauty.