While reading a book called Writing about art by Marjorie Munsterberg (also a web site), I came across something I found rather shocking. She quotes a passage by John Ruskin in which he describes a painting by Turner.

It is a sunset on the Atlantic after prolonged storm; but the storm is partially lulled, and the torn and streaming rain clouds are moving in scarlet lines to lose themselves in the hollow of the night.  The whole surface of the sea included in the picture is divided into two ridges of enormous swell, not high, nor local, but a low, broad heaving of the whole ocean, like the lifting of its bosom by deep-drawn breath after the torture of the storm.  Between these two ridges, the fire of the sunset falls along the trough of the sea, dyeing it with an awful but glorious light, the intense and lurid splendour which burns like gold and bathes like blood.  Along this fiery path and valley, the tossing waves by which the swell of the sea is restlessly divided, lift themselves in dark, indefinite, fantastic forms, each casting a faint and ghastly shadow behind it along the illumined foam.  They do not rise everywhere, but three or four together in wild groups, fitfully and furiously, as the under strength of the swell compels or permits them; leaving between them treacherous spaces of level and whirling water, now lighted with green and lamp-like fire, now flashing back the gold of the declining sun, now fearfully dyed from above with the indistinguishable images of the burning clouds, which fall upon them in flakes of crimson and scarlet, and give to the reckless waves the added motion of their own fiery flying.  Purple and blue, the lurid shadows of the hollow breakers are cast upon the mist of the night, which gathers cold and low, advancing like the shadow of death upon the guilty* ship as it labors amidst the lightning of the sea, its thin masts written upon the sky in lines of blood, girded with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror, and mixes its flaming flood with the sunlight, – and cast far along the desolate heave of the sepulchral waves, incarnadines the multitudinous sea.

[Ruskin’s note]*She is a slaver, throwing her slaves overboard.  The near sea is encoumbered with corpses.

What I found shocking was not Ruskin's verbosity, which is characteristically High Victorian, but Professor Munsterberg's comments on it.

Ruskin drew upon an immense vocabulary, using many words that are unfamiliar today.  Even his Victorian contemporaries regarded his style of writing as exceptional.  It shows the influence of the King James translation of the Bible and, in this particular passage, Shakespeare.  These are references that Ruskin assumed his audience would understand, although any modern reader needs a dictionary and specialized knowledge to follow them. (emphasis added)

I accept that detailed knowledge of Shakespeare is rare these days (although I picked up the Shakespearean reference without too much difficulty), but reading the passage again I though that there was at most one word - incarnadines - that might cause problems and that the long sentences required care in navigation but otherwise the passage was not especially problematic.

Bearing in mind that the book is intended for degree level students (so far as I can determine from the City College of New York web site) are literacy levels of undergraduate students so impoverished these days? The book overall (especially the examples of assignments) seems to me not so much about the language of art and how to use it, but almost remedial level English.

Am I missing something? I do hope so.