non-naturalism

Updated: July 22, 2025

So far as their power over certain tones of religious mind is owing to a palpable degree of non-naturalism in them, I do not praise it the exaggerated thinness of body and stiffness of attitude are faults; but they are noble faults, and give the statues a strange look of forming part of the very building itself, and sustaining it not like the Greek caryatid, without effort nor like the Renaissance caryatid, by painful or impossible effort but as if all that was silent and stern, and withdrawn apart, and stiffened in chill of heart against the terror of earth, had passed into a shape of eternal marble; and thus the Ghost had given, to bear up the pillars of the church on earth, all the patient and expectant nature that it needed no more in heaven.

John Ruskin - The Two Paths