l INTRODUCTION

The “worst architecture” alluded, one may imagine, not to the Renaissance arcades but to the church, the palace, and the campanile.¹ It would be as easy to multiply instances of depreciation of the Byzantine and Gothic architecture of Venice in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as to adduce echoes of Ruskin’s Stones of Venice from subsequent literature. The novelty of Ruskin’s views comes out very clearly in one of the contemporary reviews of this volume:-

“His chief architectural service consists in the light he has thrown upon Lombard, and especially Venetian architecture, which, until the appearance of the Seven Lamps and the Stones of Venice, was popularly regarded as the result of the ‘barbarous’ taste to which in Wren’s and Evelyn’s time even the pointed Gothic was attributed. He has proved to the hearts as well as to the heads of his readers that the Lombard architects were artists of profound and tender feelings, and that the ignorance and want of principle which has been attributed to them has only existed in ourselves. In the cases in which we felt best fortified against a good opinion of the mediæval architecture of Italy, Mr. Ruskin has met us and overthrown our theoretical objections with the most startling and unanswerable pleas. For example, the architecture of St. Mark’s at Venice has, from of old, been the but for students, as well of the classic as of the Gothic schools, to aim their wit at. Its ill-shaped domes; its walls of brick incrusted with marble; its chaotic disregard of symmetry in the details; its confused hodge-podge of classic, Moresque, and Gothic were strong points in the indictment. But Mr. Ruskin comes and assures us,” etc., etc. (Daily News, August 1, 1853).²

Ruskin’s work upon the early architecture of Venice was original and fruitful in relation both to the Byzantine and to the Gothic styles. He justly claims for himself in conjunction with Lord Lindsay the position of a pioneer (in this country at any rate) in the appreciation of Byzantine art.³ It is now well known and understood that the Church of the Holy Wisdom at Constantinople exercised a wide influence on the architecture, both of the East and of the West. Ruskin’s Stones of Venice, with its

¹ Disraeli in Contarini Fleming admires the Palladian churches, and writes of “the barbarous although picturesque buildings called the Ducal Palace.” Dickens, on the contrary, was a Ruskinian. In his Letters from Italy (1846) he is disappointed with St. Peter’s at Rome, and has “a much greater sense of mystery and wonder in the Cathedral of San Mark at Venice.” He also greatly prefers Tintoret to Michael Angelo (pp. 167, 209).

² So also the North British Review (May 1854) said: “In our opinion-and we have made no light study of architecture and its related arts-the most important piece of criticism as yet produced by Mr. Ruskin is his account and justification of the Church of St. Mark’s Venice, an edifice which, up to the time of the publication of The Stones of Venice, was a stumbling-block and a mystery to all persons, architects or amateurs, who beheld it.”

³ Seven Lamps, Vol. VIII. p. 121 n.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]