In Victorian England, the new science of geology that was made accessible to a wide audience through the Principles of Geology written by Charles Lyell drove many authors and artists to look at the world in a new way. Among them, John Ruskin was one of the few to sustain and develop his interest in the subject throughout his life: at the age of twelve, he started writing a mineralogical dictionary and later remained an active member of Meteorological and Geological Societies. His very first published article, which appeared in London’s Magazine of Natural History in 1834, also revealed his taste for science and geography in relation to aesthetics by offering an inquiry on “the causes of colour of the Water of the Rhine”.
No doubt Modern Painters is the follow-up to the idea that science and art go hand in hand, and are tools to explore the natural world. In the same fashion, the enthusiasm for Turner and pre-Raphaelite painting can also be seen as a direct consequence of his scientific study of nature. Finally the collection of 40,000 rocks, fossils and minerals in the geology collection of the Sheffield Museum that Ruskin assembled as a resource for the education of the people testifies to his view that knowledge of science and art starts from close observation of our immediate surroundings and a personal mapping out of the universe.

In this paper, I should like to explore how Ruskin tries to use the new advances of science and geology to support his own vision of the world, sometimes using a geological approach to address his audience and impose his own narrative of landscape. I will then analyse the way in which Ruskin’s geological research had an impact, not so much in the field of science as in his teaching of art and education where his knowledge of minerals was used as a metaphor.