John Ruskin’s conservation movement

Following the increasing practice of restoration and as a reaction against it, a new approach to the treatment of historic artefacts came about which was in favour of protection and preservation as opposed to restoration. John Ruskin’s publication of The Seven Lamps of Architecture in 1849 was a direct attack on the destruction of historic buildings caused by restoration practice and set out the core principles of the conservation movement. Through the seven lamps – sacrifice, truth, power, beauty, life, memory and obedience – Ruskin recognised the moment of an artefact’s original creation. As this moment is unrepeatable, the practice of restoration is inappropriate and must be forbidden. In Aphorism 31 in the Lamp of Memory, he denounces restoration as

the most total destruction which a building can suffer: a destruction out of which no remnants can be gathered: a destruction accompanied with false description with the things destroyed. Do not let us deceive ourselves in this important matter; it is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture.⁴⁰

Therefore, when it comes to historic buildings Ruskin detests restoration, for it is ‘a Lie from beginning to end’.⁴¹ He proposes to look at buildings as they stand at the time of enquiry. By preserving the building’s integrity, the personal sacrifice of everybody involved in its creation is respected too. This way its beauty, which is in essence man’s understanding of the beauty of nature, is preserved too. Ruskin’s bold assertion was that the glory of a building is to be found in its age, and thus through restoration its true age and glory will vanish.⁴² He affirms ‘[w]e have no right whatever to touch them. They are not ours. They belong partly to those who built them, and partly to all the generations of mankind who are to follow us’ (emphasis in the original).⁴³ It is therefore imperative that historic buildings be conserved. On the other hand, buildings constructed in our times can be freely and righteously destroyed, as we are both their creators and destroyers.

Ruskin’s theories on conservation were digested slowly. At first the protection of historic buildings was practised and funded by individuals. In 1877 Sidney Colvin, the Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Cambridge, further promoted Ruskin’s key points to the public in his article ‘Restoration and Anti-Restoration’. In the same year and as a result of this exposure, William Morris founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.⁴⁴ Morris’s views on conservation can be summed up in his term anti-scrape, according to which buildings are likened to living beings with a limited lifespan and subject to unavoidable decay. If, however, repairs are necessary, the building should be protected with a minimum effort and without any restoration works.⁴⁵ Other individual groups that were formed to protect historic buildings are the Ancient Monuments Society, the Georgian Group and the Victorian Society, all of which are still active today. The first law to be enforced to protect historic buildings was passed on 18 August 1882. This was the Ancient Monuments Act and dealt with pre-historic monuments such as Stonehenge.⁴⁶ It was only after the end of World War II that listing became the means to protect historically significant buildings. In France, the conservation movement was also becoming popular and was supported by famous personalities, such as Anatole France, Victor Hugo and Marcel Proust, who openly attacked Viollet-Le-Duc’s restoration practice.⁴⁷ As a result, the first law dealing with the protection of historic buildings in France was passed on 30 March 1887. This reaction to the British conservation movement against the restoration of buildings spread to the rest of Europe, and since then the United Kingdom has been a leading force in architectural conservation theory and practice.⁴⁸

Ruskin’s anti-restoration movement gave negative connotations to the term restoration in the English language and the overall practice of dealing with historic buildings has since been called conservation.⁴⁹ A contradiction arises if one considers that in Latin languages the word restoration (restauro in Italian, restauration in French and so on) has an almost equivalent meaning to the word conservation in English. Relativist theorists maintain that there are two possible definitions of conservation. One follows the Ruskin tradition that opposes the practice of restoration. The other deals with a broader activity that includes restoration amongst other practices and aims also at protection.⁵⁰ To avoid confusion, in recent years there has been a reassessment of the words restoration and conservation, and of the relationship between them. Some scholars have proposed a new, combined term, restoration-conservation, which was introduced by the Italian historian Alessandra Melucco Vaccaro in 1996.⁵¹ In North America, the term restoration has come to imply the reintegration of lost styles and the term used has been changed to historic preservation.⁵² In this book, the word conservation refers to how it has come to be understood and practised in Britain.