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in the graphic arts you have Skill, Beauty, and Likeness; and in the architectural arts, Skill, Beauty, and Use
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“in the graphic arts you have Skill, Beauty, and Likeness; and in the architectural arts, Skill, Beauty, and Use”

John Ruskin

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Source
Lectures on Art, Delivered Before the University of Oxford in Hilary Term, 1870
Date
1870
Meaning

Meaning of “in the graphic arts you have Skill, Beauty,…”

The contrast gives Ruskin a compact framework for evaluating different arts: skilled execution and beauty remain common while representation or use changes with the form.

Source context

Where does it come from?

Lectures on Art, Lecture IV, Project Gutenberg #19164. Capitalization follows Ruskin’s analytical categories in the lecture.

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ArtBeautifulCreativityPurpose Quotes About Direction, Duty & Meaningful WorkThinking Quotes About Reasoning, Reflection & JudgmentWork Ethic
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We shall never learn the affinities of beauty
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“We shall never learn the affinities of beauty”

Robert Louis Stevenson · Essays in the Art of Writing · 1905
Meaning & context

Stevenson treats beauty as deeper than any complete technical explanation, warning that analysis of artistic mechanism does not exhaust why form can move or delight.

Source details

Essays in the Art of Writing, “On Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature,” represented by the 1905 Chatto & Windus edition in Project Gutenberg #492. The collection is posthumous; the excerpt concerns literary aesthetics.

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All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.
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“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.”

Walter Pater · The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry · 1873
Meaning & context

Pater uses music as his model for the closest possible union of form and content, a critical claim about artistic structure rather than a literal hierarchy of media.

Source details

The Renaissance, “The School of Giorgione”; Project Gutenberg #2398. The surrounding paragraph explains that other arts strive to reduce the separation between matter and form.

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Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated.
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“Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated.”

Oscar Wilde · The Picture of Dorian Gray — 1891 edition · 1891
Voice: Authorial / signed preface voice · Oscar Wilde — Preface
Meaning & context

The line makes beauty partly a matter of interpretation: cultivation shows itself not only in seeing a beautiful object but in discovering meaning within it.

Source details

The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891 edition, Preface; Wilde distinguishes different ways readers and viewers respond to beauty.

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If we work thus we shall be men, and our days will be happy and eventful.
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“If we work thus we shall be men, and our days will be happy and eventful.”

William Morris · Signs of Change · 1888
Meaning & context

After describing work that engages mind, memory, imagination and the will to create, Morris presents such activity as a way of making daily life active and meaningful.

Source details

Signs of Change, lecture “Useful Work versus Useless Toil”; Project Gutenberg #3053. “Thus” refers to creative work engaging mind, memory, imagination and bodily effort.

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To define beauty, not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible
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“To define beauty, not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible”

Walter Pater · The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry · 1873
Meaning & context

Pater begins aesthetic criticism by preferring close attention to particular works and experiences over a universal formula, making discrimination and concrete observation central to judgment.

Source details

The Renaissance, Preface; Project Gutenberg #2398, represented sixth-edition text. The phrase introduces Pater’s method of aesthetic criticism.

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