INTRODUCTION xlvii

always regarded his work upon Venice as an interlude, a diversion, an interruption. “All that I did at Venice,” he says, “was by-work, because her history had been falsely written before... Something also was due,” he adds, “to my love of gliding about in gondolas.”¹ But he came to recognise that through this by-way he had been led to the heart of the matter. His study of Tintoret (in 1845) had led him “into the study of the history of Venice herself; and through that into what else I have traced or told of the laws of national strength and virtue. I am happy in having done this so that the truth of it must stand.”² And similarly in a letter to a Venetian friend, Count Zorzi, he calls himself “a foster-child of Venice; she has taught me all that I have rightly learned of the arts which are my joy; and of all the happy and ardent days, which, in my earlier life, it was granted to me to spend in this holy land of Italy, none were so precious as those which I used to pass in the bright recess of your Piazzetta, by the pillars of Acre; looking sometimes to the glimmering mosaics in the vaults of the church; sometimes to the Square, thinking of its immortal memories; sometimes to the Palace and the Sea.”³ Before coming to the lessons learnt and taught by Ruskin from the stones of Venice we may remark that the digression turned out to lead back to the main theme of Modern Painters, which was the history of the art of landscape painting. It was “the Renaissance frosts,”⁴Ruskin held, that had killed at once the vital art of architecture, and the love of landscape. He was full of this point as he neared the end of his book:-

“I have now done all the hard dry work,” he writes to his father (April 26, 1852), “and I see my superstructure in progress-a noble subject: Why is it that we have now no great art, except in landscape, and what the consequences will be, if we continue in this state; while the ‘except in landscape’ forms, as I told you, the subject of the third volume of Modern Painters. All Modern Painters together will be the explanation of a parenthesis in The Stones of Venice.”⁵

Or, to put it the other way round, as Ruskin sometimes did, all The Stones of Venice was the explanation of a point in Modern Painters. It was thus that Ruskin put the matter in an earlier letter than the one referred to above; it will be found cited in a note on p. 207, below. So,

¹ Praeterita, i. ch. ix. § 180.

² Ibid. ii. ch. vii. § 140.

³ Osservazioni intorno ai Ristauri interni ed esterni della Basilica di San Marco, Venezia, 1877, p. 12.

⁴ Stones of Venice, vol. i. ch. xxi. § 31; vol. iii. ch. i. § 23.

⁵ That is to say, the parenthetical explanation of the manner in which the Renaissance, by destroying the picturesque element in architecture, contributed to divert the love of nature into landscape painting: see below, p. 207.

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