The writer, artist, activist and environmentalist John Ruskin (1819–1900) frequently described objects – from the natural world, to the built environment, to works of art – as proleptic: in that they seem to anticipate their future state, function, or symbolic meaning. Ruskin’s architectural studies, and sketches from nature, comprised a flashforward into a vanishing world. Elegiac and retrospective meditations on ‘the golden stain of time’ (LE 8:234), they anticipated loss: of medieval craftsmanship, ecological equilibrium, and transcendent values.

The mediation of imagined futures through things with a sense of anticipation or evolution is central to Ruskin’s depiction of architecture as proleptic form: for example, with its structural irregularities. In The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851-53), Ruskin argues that all architecture gestures towards an unfinished future, accruing identity and modification over time. It is no accident that Ruskin favoured Gothic architecture, which emulates the natural world, his other great passion, and that he also described natural forms as proleptic – foreshadowing human artistic development. In the first of his Lectures on Architecture and Painting (1853) he observed that the beauty of the leaves of a tree of flower is principally derived from the way ‘every one of its leaves I terminated, more or less, in the form of the pointed arch’ (LE 12:25).

In relation to this workshop’s emphasis on ‘the lifeworld itself’ as ‘increasingly proleptic’, Ruskin’s depictions of skies as proleptic objects are perhaps his most far-reaching experiment using the generative temporalities of word and image in his works. In Modern Painters he described J.M.W. Turner’s paintings as foretelling ecological disaster: ‘written upon the sky in lines of blood’ (LE 3:372). Ruskin mirrored Turner’s ‘torn and streaming rainclouds’ (LE 3:571) in his evocation of the ‘plague wind’ darkening the skies across Europe in his apocalyptic lectures – ‘The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth century’– at the Royal Institution in 1884. In these, Ruskin attempted both to describe phenomena situated beyond the temporal and spatial parameters of contemporary epistemologies, and to develop interpretative and aesthetic frameworks – both visual and verbal – through which such phenomena could be conceptualized. ‘Try always,’ he urged his students in The Elements of Drawing, ‘whenever you look at a form, to see the lines in it which have had power over its past fate and will have power over its futurity’ (LE 15:91).