Sesame and Lilies: Lectures on Art

John Ruskin was the founder of modern art history. Without getting acquainted with his works, it is almost impossible to fully understand the whole specificity of the world of art—because it was Ruskin who laid the foundations of a method of learning about the greatest works of painting, literature, and even nature itself. With this book, the reader can feel like a listener in the first row of an Oxford lecture hall—where John Ruskin himself steps up to the podium. Here the reader will find the legendary “Lectures on Art”—the most significant, according to the author, work of Ruskin’s life, in which he set out a new methodology for analyzing art. In Ruskin’s writings, art is inseparably connected with morality, religion, nature, and human life in general. In addition, the reader will find lectures that have not been published in over a hundred years in Russian, titled “Sesame and Lilies.”