L’attualità di John Ruskin: architettura come espressione di sentimenti alla luce degli studi estetici e neuroscientifici

The contribution reads John Ruskin’s writings considering the recent studies on emotions, feelings, empathy, experience. An interest that takes up the currents of thought that developed in the late nineteenth century in Europe (Sichtbarkeit and Einfuhlung) and with the Phenomenology in the first half of the twentieth century. The relationship between art and sentiment had previously been investigated in depth and lucidly by John Ruskin. In his writings painting and architecture are expressive vehicles of ideas (beauty, truth, memory, etc.), understandable only through feeling and sympathy. The contemporary look can therefore recover the Ruskinian reading, often considered only in its picturesque aspects, restoring it to freshness and the role of instrument of reflection on architecture, memory and conservation also for the present generation.