xx INTRODUCTION

perhaps, better to say-in obeying a new call. He was ever impetuous and enthusiastic; whatever his hand found to do, he began doing with all his might on the instant. In 1845 he had heard a fresh call, and had turned from the study of rocks and clouds to that of Fra Angelico and Tintoret.¹ He hurried home full of fervour, and put out the second volume of Modern Painters. But already, as we have seen, another interest was stirring within him. His gift for architectural drawing had greatly developed, and he saw around him on all sides the passing away of beautiful buildings which he felt that he had the capacity to understand and the skill to record.² It was a question, he said to himself, of now or never. Whilst he was taking drawings from one side of buildings, the “restorers” were knocking down the other.³ Delay would be doubly fatal. He might be too late to record, and his readers would no longer be able to see. Thus the same burning enthusiasm that first threw Ruskin into the defence of Turner, and then into the interpretation of Tintoret, now diverted him to mediæval architecture.⁴

Perhaps, too, something was due to intellectual reaction. Ruskin had, as we have seen,⁵ felt severely the strain of the second volume of Modern Painters. Like most great workers, he knew only one form of recreation-a change of work. The close study of architecture may have come as a relief from that of painting. Certain it is that the diary of his continental tour in 1846⁶ is, for the first time, filled as much with notes on stained glass, on sculpture, and on architecture, as with descriptions of scenery or pictorial effects. Something in this latter sort there is;⁷ he was then finishing, it will be remembered, a revision for the third edition of Modern Painters, vol. i., and in that edition extracts from his diary of 1846 were introduced.⁸ But the new feature in the diary is the author’s pre-occupation with architectural details. At Venice he was already busy with elaborate measurements of the buildings. He fills many pages, too, with notes on Willis’s recently-published and epoch-making book on

¹ Vol. IV. p. xxiv.

² See Vol. IV. pp. xxvi., 37-41.

³ See below, Preface to First Edition, § 1 n., p. 3.

⁴ See below, p. 3.

⁵ Vol. IV. p. xxxix.

⁶ The itinerary of this tour was as follows:-Milan (April 14), Sens, Dijon (April 17), Champagnole (April 19), Geneva (April 21), Chambéry (April 26), St. Jean de Maurienne (April 27), Turin, Vercelli (May 4), Arona (May 6), Bergamo (May 7), Como, Verona (May 10), Venice (May 14), Padua (May 28), Bologna (June 1), Florence (June 7), Vevay (August 10), Geneva (August 15), Chamouni (August 23), Lucerne (August 31), Troyes, Châtillon-sur-Seine (Sept. 23). The dates are those on which entries happen to be made in the diary.

⁷ See the extracts given in Prœterita, ii. ch. x. § 190.

⁸ See Vol. III. pp. 500, 504.

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