THE STONES OF VENICE

RUSKIN, John

Published by Smith, Elder and Co., London, 1874

The Stones of Venice is a three-volume treatise on Venetian art and architecture by English art historian John Ruskin, first published from 1851 to 1853.

The Stones of Venice examines Venetian architecture in detail, describing for example over eighty churches. Ruskin discusses architecture of Venice's Byzantine, Gothic, and Renaissance periods, and provides a general history of the city.

Views on art and society

As well as being an art historian, Ruskin was a social reformer. He set out to prove how Venetian architecture exemplified the principles he discussed in his earlier work, The Seven Lamps of Architecture.[1] In the chapter "The Nature of Gothic" (from volume 2), Ruskin gives his views on how society should be organised.

We want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen, in the best sense. As it is, we make both ungentle, the one envying, the other despising, his brother; and the mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers and miserable workers. Now it is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.

Research and publication

Ruskin had visited Venice before, but he made two visits to Venice with his wife Effie specially to research the book. The first visit was in the winter of 1849-50. The first volume of The Stones of Venice appeared in 1851 and Ruskin spent another winter in Venice researching the next two volumes. His research methods included sketching and photography (by 1849 he had acquired his own camera so that he could take daguerreotypes).

John Ruskin (8 February 1819 – 20 January 1900) was an English writer, philosopher, art historian, art critic and polymath of the Victorian era. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and political economy.

Ruskin was heavily engaged by the work of Viollet le Duc which he taught to all his pupils including William Morris, notably Viollet le Duc's Dictionary which he considered as "the only book of any value on architecture".[1]

Ruskin's writing styles and literary forms were equally varied. He wrote essays and treatises, poetry and lectures, travel guides and manuals, letters and even a fairy tale. He also made detailed sketches and paintings of rocks, plants, birds, landscapes, architectural structures and ornamentation. The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art gave way in time to plainer language designed to communicate his ideas more effectively. In all of his writing, he emphasised the connections between nature, art and society.

Ruskin was hugely influential in the latter half of the 19th century and up to the First World War. After a period of relative decline, his reputation has steadily improved since the 1960s with the publication of numerous academic studies of his work. Today, his ideas and concerns are widely recognised as having anticipated interest in environmentalism, sustainability and craft.

Ruskin first came to widespread attention with the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), an extended essay in defence of the work of J. M. W. Turner in which he argued that the principal role of the artist is "truth to nature". From the 1850s, he championed the Pre-Raphaelites, who were influenced by his ideas. His work increasingly focused on social and political issues. Unto This Last (1860, 1862) marked the shift in emphasis. In 1869, Ruskin became the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford, where he established the Ruskin School of Drawing. In 1871, he began his monthly "letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain", published under the title Fors Clavigera (1871–1884). In the course of this complex and deeply personal work, he developed the principles underlying his ideal society. As a result, he founded the Guild of St George, an organisation that endures today.