INTRODUCTION lxiii

all the information I wanted, the sketch was thrown aside and only preserved as a memorial of certain facts. I have now arrived at a time of life when I feel that my knowledge must-if it is ever to be so-be expressed in an intelligible form, legible by others as well as by myself. The drawings which I now am making here will be brought home, not only finished, but framed, ready to be sent to the engraver the moment they are unpacked. They will also be much more popular in form and manner-many of them like the little vignettes to Rogers.”

These remarks apply especially to such vignetted drawings as those in Plates 15 and 16. The drawing for Plate 16 has been exhibited (see above, p. xvii.), and those who saw it will remember that the engravers had nothing left to add in the matter of delicacy. Their work, however, gave the author much satisfaction. “I am really very well pleased,” he wrote to his father (July 17, 1853), “with even the coloured plates, if only all the copies are as good as that sent me, and like the engravings very much when seen altogether.”

The illustrations added in this edition represent different methods, and periods, in Ruskin’s drawing; some of them being sketches in a broader manner, others showing the same refinement as those noticed above. The frontispiece is a drawing of a portion of the Fondaco de’ Turchi (see ch. v.) as it stood at the time when The Stones of Venice was written. The drawing, which is in water-colour (13¼x18½), is in the collection of Mrs. Cunliffe, The Croft, Ambleside.

Plate A is a sketch of San Giorgio in Alga,-the church of “St. George of the Seaweed,” described in chapter i. (p. 4). The drawing, which is in colour (7x9), is in the possession of Mrs. Arthur Severn, at Herne Hill. Its date is 1849.

Plate B, Murano, is a sketch of a much later date (1876). The scene is described in ch. iii. (p. 39).

Plate C, from J. W. Bunney’s oil-painting of the west front of St. Mark’s, is here introduced in order to enable the reader to follow more easily Ruskin’s descriptions of the building and references to it. The picture, which measures 7 feet 7 inches wide, and 5 feet high, is in the Ruskin Museum at Sheffield. The picture was commissioned by Ruskin and partly paid for out of a St. Mark’s Fund raised by him in 1879-1883; the artist spent upon it no less than six hundred days’ constant labour. It is, as it was intended to be, a strictly accurate architectural record; the clearness of the plate, even when the picture is reduced from feet to inches, is remarkable. Particulars of the artist and of his work for Ruskin will be found in a later volume of this edition.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]