mundaneness

Updated: May 5, 2025

Perhaps some such feelings as these Mr. Ruskin himself at one time experienced, until, shocked by what he deemed the excessive mundaneness, the intense unspirituality of the great Fleming, he revolted to the thoughtful, attenuated poetry of Angelico and the early Italian painters, to be in time again driven by the too intense asceticism and archaic debility of this school, to the robust excellence and the more real and material, though pure and refined, beauty of the Venetians.

Dutton Cook - Art in England: Notes and Studies