INTRODUCTION liii

from, which will, it is hoped, be found convenient (p. 468). Occasional notes of a similar kind are given on topographical points. In this part of their work the editors gratefully acknowledge the assistance rendered them by the Rev. Dr. Alexander Robertson, of Venice; to Mr. Horatio Brown also they are indebted for information kindly given on particular points.

In the study and appreciation of the Gothic of Venice, as well as in the vindication of its Byzantine basilica, Ruskin was again a pioneer. “No one,” he says, “had ever drawn the traceries of the Ducal Palace till I did it myself ...; and not a soul in England knew that there was a system in Venetian architecture at all, until I made the measured (to half and quarter inches) elevation of it, and gave the analysis of its tracery mouldings and their development from those of the Frari (Stones of Venice, vol. ii. ch. vii.).”¹ Ruskin attached importance, too, to the definition of Gothic generally, on its structural side, which he worked out in the sixth chapter of this volume. In one of the little pocket note-books already referred to (Vol. IX. p. xxv.), filled with notes and sketches made in 1849, Ruskin jotted down some of the main points here developed (pp. 245-265). In looking through the note-book in after years, he summarised its contents and wrote: “My first ideas for the Stones of Venice (the mathematical part) put down as they came into my head in travelling” (from York to Scotland). To the influence of Ruskin’s defence of Gothic architecture some reference has already been made in connection with The Seven Lamps of Architecture (Vol. VIII. p. xlii.), but this influence was greatly deepened by The Stones of Venice. The Gothic Revival in England did not originate with Ruskin, but he gave to it a stimulus and an extension. He introduced Venetian Gothic into the movement; he made it popular, and gave to it the force derived from his incomparable resources of argument, imagination and eloquence. “We do not remember anything in the history of art in England,” wrote a reviewer in the year following the completion of The Stones of Venice, “at all corresponding in suddenness and extent to the effect which the works of Mr. Ruskin have already exercised upon the popular taste directly, and through popular taste on the taste and theories of artists themselves.”² The character of this influence has been traced by the historian of the movement:-

“Students who, but a year or so previously, had been content to regard Pugin as their leader, or who had modelled their works of art on the principles of the Ecclesiologist, found a new field open to them and hastened

¹ Notes on Prout and Hunt, No. 58.

² North British Review, May 1854, vol. 21, pp. 172-200, in a notice of The Stones of Venice, vols. ii. and iii.

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