Focusing on a little read text of the mid-1860s,The Cestus of Aglaia, the essay aims to retrace the development of the new emphasis accorded the hand and «manual execution» in Ruskin’s later thinking on art. In the 1840s Ruskin considered the materially productive aspect of artistic creation as consistently subordinated to “thought”, “truth” and “poetry”. However, by the mid-1860s – as a consequence both of his new attention to the relation between art, commerce and manufacture, and of his own experience in teaching workmen – he began to consider the importance of the “outline” as an elementary principle of artistic creation and in terms of ethical qualities such as “resoluteness”, “control” and “steadiness of hand”, and above all of “rightness”.
