The Architecture of Empire: “Oriental” Gothic and the Problem of British Identity in Ruskin's Venice

Abstract

On january 13, 1858 — a few months after the eruption of the Indian Mutiny — John Ruskin addressed an audience at the South Kensington Museum in London with a lecture entitled “The Deteriorative Power of Conventional Art over Nations” (published the following year as Lecture I ofThe Two Paths). Commenting on the dearth of artistic talent to be found in Scotland as opposed to the artistic abundance of India, Ruskin decrees that Indians are a “race rejoicing in art, and eminently and universally endowed with the gift of it,” whereas with Scots one is faced with “a people careless of art and apparently incapable of it” (16: 262).

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