Corresponded.

Hill, Amiens Cathedral, 1918

Seeking more fuel from art, Proust started reading John Ruskin, whose influential The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851-53) revived popular interest in medieval art. Proust’s fascination coincided with the British critic’s death in 1900, and he wrote a long obituary on Ruskin in Gazette des Beaux-Arts. He then embarked on a Ruskin-translation project, working with his mother, who knew English much better than he did, and consulting with Marie Nordlinger, a British cousin of his close friend Reynaldo Hahn. The translation project took six years and led Proust to visit French cathedral cities as well as Venice and Padua where he saw, for the first time, Italian art and architecture.

The Ruskin-Proust marriage was productive but complicated. Proust, born of a Jewish mother and raised Catholic by atheist parents, did not share Ruskin’s religious faith or moral puritanism. Their tastes in art differed, too. The doctrinaire Ruskin publicly decried the paintings of James McNeill Whistler while Proust, whose tastes in visual art were more or less random, hung Whistler’s portrait of Thomas Carlyle in his bedroom.

But Ruskin found in art a force equal to the natural and organic worlds it mirrored, and that equilibrium, combined with his conviction that art’s meaning must exceed its sensual pleasures, corresponded to Proust’s growing unease with fin de siècle decadence, art-for-arts sake, and trendy forms of arty obscurantism – not least his own tendencies toward those excesses.

Being a sort of spiritual empiricist, Ruskin understood how medieval art and architecture documents human apprehensions of timelessness. In particular, the critic’s writing on Amiens’ Notre Dame Cathedral charts how the Church’s art and architecture concertize Biblical narratives and Christian prophecies. These ideas nudged Proust closer to his own reconsideration about the nature of time.

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