lxiv INTRODUCTION

If the reader will refer to Mr. William White’s Principles of Art as Illustrated in the Ruskin Museum (1895), he will find opposite p. 237 a reproduction of another work by Bunney of the same kind-“The North-West Angle of St. Mark’s, Venice.” This is also the subject of Ruskin’s drawing reproduced in Plate D, and it would be interesting, if the discussion would not take us too far afield, to contrast the detailed record of the one with the brilliant effect of the other. “This drawing,” says Professor Charles Eliot Norton, to whose collection it belongs, “is a study of colour to which Mr. Ruskin’s remarks on a study of similar character in the London Exhibition equally apply.”¹ The reference is to Ruskin’s Notes on his Drawings by Turner (1878). The exhibition included also several of Ruskin’s own drawings, and under No. 12R (a study of the Ducal Palace) he discusses the question how far, and by what means, it is possible to combine architectural detail with colour effect. Professor Norton’s drawing was copied for him by Ruskin, in 1879, from part of a sketch made in 1877, and now at Brantwood. The reader will observe that in the arch over the portico is the piece of Byzantine sculpture which figured on the cover of the earlier editions of The Stones of Venice (see the facsimile facing p. liv. in Vol. IX.); it is engraved in Plate XI. below, and described at p. 168.

Plate E-showing five shafts and capitals of St. Mark’s and part of the understored cornice-is from a drawing which must have been made at the time The Stones of Venice was written, and is a fine example of Ruskin’s picturesque rendering of architecture. The five shafts are in the second tier, on the spectator’s left, of the central porch. Two of them are entirely, and one is partly, under the base of the archivolt which is sculptured with the Trades of Venice (see below, p. 316 n.). The shafts outside the base of the archivolt support a ledge, on which pigeons rest and rain falls; manure earth is thus formed, and hence comes the vegetation shown in ruskin’s drewing. This has long since been cleared away; its presence in Ruskin’s time, though very picturesque, was hardly conductive to the preservation of the building, and is characteristic of the neglect of the fabric under the Austrian occupation. The first column, on the spectator’s right, had chequer-work upon it (indicated on the left side in the drawing), which was destroyed in Ruskin’s day. The drawing, which is in water-colour (8¾ x 5¼), is in the collection of Sir John Simon, K.C.B.

Plate F is from a beautiful drawing in the possession of Mr. George Thomson, of Huddersfield. The drawing adds to Ruskin’s original plates an excellent illustration of windows of the Third Order (below);

¹ Notes on Drawings by Mr. Ruskin, placed on exhibition by Professor Norton..., December 1879, New York, p. 30.

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