xliv INTRODUCTION

ample to furnish forth two volumes. The first volume, as we have seen, was concerned with “The Foundations.” To the second, which was occupied with the Byzantine and the Gothic buildings of Venice, he gave the sub-title of “The Sea-Stories,” or, as he calls them in the Examples of the Architecture of Venice,¹ “The Water-Stories.” He explains the title in a letter to his father:-

“October 16 [1851].-... The second volume is to be called ‘The Sea-Stories,’ for what on land we call a ground floor, I always call in speaking of Venetian building the Sea Story, and this will give you the same kind of double meaning to the title of the second volume that there is in the first.”²

The volume was to be concerned with the palaces which were raised on the inlets of the sea, and this central period in Venetian architecture was the period also of her best strength as Queen of the Adriatic. The third volume, dealing with the Renaissance buildings, was naturally entitled “The Fall,” though the author afterwards regretted that he had not thought of another title:-

“I almost wish,” he wrote to his father (from Glenfinlas, September 18, 1853), “I had thought of Isaiah xxxiv. 11 before fixing the title of the third volume. I think The ‘Stones of Emptiness’ would so precisely have fitted the Renaissance architecture.”³

The work involved in the third volume was greatly increased by the Venetian Index, in which Ruskin noted for the use of travellers all the principal buildings of the city, and included descriptions of many of the pictures. The notice of the works of Tintoret in the school and church of S. Rocco were particularly elaborate, and became among the best known and most often quoted passages of Ruskin’s works. His study of Tintoret had begun, as we have already seen,⁴ in 1845, and in this respect The Stones of Venice was a continuation of Modern Painters.

The publication of the second and third volumes, so near together as to enable them to be read and reviewed consecutively, added sensibly to Ruskin’s already high reputation. The novelty of his views, the ingenuity and knowledge with which they were presented, the orderly marshalling of his subject, the imaginative eloquence of his language, made a deep impression. One of his principal themes in this second

¹ Letterpress to Plate 8 of the Examples, in the next volume.

² See Vol. IX. pp. xxxiv. and xlv.

³ “But the cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it; and he shall stretch out upon it the line of confusion, and the stones of emptiness.”

⁴ See Vol. IV. pp. xxxvii.-xxxix.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]