Ruskin sketches beside a moss-covered rock.

A quiet hand on trembling stone

John Ruskin (1819–1900), the English writer and draughtsman, devotes a chapter of Modern Painters to leaves that scarcely move. He begins with plants whose movements everyone knows. Pines sway and grasses tremble. Then he leads the eye down towards the lichens whose edges barely lift away from crystals in the granite. Here even the question of what can be distinguished as a leaf becomes an exercise in looking closely.

The gesture of moss and lichen

[…] creatures full of pity, covering with strange and tender honor the scarred disgrace of ruin, — laying quiet finger on the trembling stones, to teach them rest.

– John Ruskin, Modern Painters, 1891, p. 99.[1]

Ruskin moves from sight to touch. A soft surface lies over the hardness of a rock. The writer makes it a gesture such as a person might use to calm someone in distress. The surprising word is “trembling.” A moment earlier the grass was trembling. Now the movement belongs to the stone. A damaged building makes the reversal especially vivid. A block that has slipped out of its course has lost much of the steadiness we usually take for granted in it.

Another way of looking at a painting

For a painter the distinction matters. A ruin can be drawn with sharp fractures and open joints. Where moss has grown, the transition between blocks becomes softer, and green covers the scar left by earlier damage. Someone who dismisses such a spot as incidental misses part of the history unfolding on the surface. For Ruskin the inconspicuous growth becomes the very thing in which an observer can discern an act of care. No human figure need appear in the painting. A narrow edge of lichen will do.