liv INTRODUCTION

to occupy it. They prepared designs in which the elements of Italian Gothic were largely introduced; churches in which the ‘lily capital’ of St. Mark’s was found side by side with Byzantine bas-reliefs and mural inlay from Murano; town halls wherein the arcation and baseless columns of the Ducal Palace were reproduced; mansions which borrowed their parapets from the Calle del Bagatin, and windows from the Ca’ d’Oro. They astonished their masters by talking of the savageness of Northern Gothic, of the Intemperance of Curves, and the Laws of Foliation; and broke out into open heresy in their abuse of Renaissance detail. They went to Venice or Verona-not to study the works of Sansovino and San Michele-but to sketch the tomb of the Scaligers and to measure the front of the Hotel Danieli. They made drawings in the Zoological Gardens, and conventionalised the forms of birds, beasts, and reptiles into examples of ‘noble grotesque’ for decorative sculpture. They read papers before Architectural Societies, embodying Mr. Ruskin’s sentiments in language which rivalled the force, if it did not exactly match the refinement, of their model. They made friends of the Pre-Raphaelite painters (then rising into fame), and promised themselves as radical a reform in national architecture as had been inaugurated in the field of pictorial art. Nor was this all. Not a few architects who had already established a practice began to think that there might be something worthy of attention in the new doctrine. Little by little they fell under its influence. Discs of marble, billet-mouldings, and other details of Italian Gothic crept into many a London street-front. Then bands of coloured brick (chiefly red and yellow) were introduced, and the voussoirs of arches were treated after the same fashion.

“But the influence of Mr. Ruskin’s teaching reached a higher level than this, and manifested itself in unexpected quarters. Years afterwards, in the centre of the busiest part of our busy capital-the very last place one would have supposed likely to be illumined by the light of The Seven Lamps-more than one palatial building was raised, which recalled in the leading features of its design and decoration the distinctive character of Venetian Gothic. The literature of the Revival was sensibly affected by the same cause. It is impossible not to recognise, even in the title of Mr. Street’s charming volume, The Brick and Marble Architecture of North Italy [1855], a palpable echo from The Stones of Venice, while in some of his theories-as, for instance, that the undulation in the pavement of St. Mark’s was intended to typify the stormy seas of life-we find a reflex of Mr. Ruskin’s tendency to natural symbolisms.”¹

Mr. Eastlake mentions a curious evidence of the extent to which Ruskin’s architectural writings had impressed themselves upon the life of the time. The Latin Epilogue to the Westminister Play is generally a

¹ A History of the Gothic Revival, by Charles L. Eastlake, 1872, pp. 278-280. Mr. Eastlake’s volume is copiously illustrated, and contains in an appendix a list of “selected examples of Gothic buildings,” with dates and other particulars, from which the development of the Revival and Ruskin’s influence upon it may be traced.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]