July
22
/ 2016
Victorian art critic, John Ruskin, in his book Proserpina, calls himself “the gentle and happy scholar of flowers”. A large part of his work is an attempt to connect nature, art and society. To prove this, he attempted to show that species can and do symbolize the ethical qualities of mankind, representing man’s states of good and evil, as well as the timeless human belief of destruction or redemption. The bird and the serpent are Ruskin's major examples of these associations. As the bird is the symbol of the spirit of life, the serpent is the symbol of the sting of death. With this intriguing interpretation, Ruskin reintroduced a very wide-spread ancient belief. The association of the bird and the
