The Laws of Fesole: Principles of Drawing and Painting from the Tuscan Masters

John Ruskin (1819-1900) was the most influential art critic of the nineteenth century. A watercolorist, a botanist, a moralist, a sensualist, a socialist, an economist, a Romantic, a prophet, a priest, and a poet, his writings integrate the aesthetic experience with moral purpose and ecology. He established his reputation with The Stones of Venice and his masterwork, Modern Painters, then held the Slade Professorship of Art at Oxford University from 1870 to 1878. One of his students, Oscar Wilde, said of him, "To you the gods gave eloquence such as they have given no other, so that your message might come to us from the fire of passion and the marvel of music, making the deaf to hear and the blind to see."

Bill Beckley is an artist who has exhibited widely in America and Europe since l970. His works are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, and the Guggenheim in New York; The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He teaches Semiotics and Film at the School of Visual Arts in New York and is the editor for the Aesthetics Today series from Allworth Press.