xvi INTRODUCTION

appears from a letter to his father, made a beginning, or rather two beginnings, of this work:-

“January 30 [1852].-... I did the little vignette enclosed for part of the chapter on tombs-there were to have been others beside them. I found the scale a little too small and am doing them larger, so the enclosed is waste paper and may amuse you. The lowest and richest is the tomb of the two Doges Tiepolos, of whom you shall hear.”¹

There are many rough sketches and pictorial memoranda of the tombs, but no finished drawings have been found. Perhaps before he had gone far in the work, Ruskin decided to discuss the tombs in the more general manner adopted in the text; and the labour and expense of so many illustrations may also have induced him to that course. A mass of written material on the subject exists, however, which he preserved together with the MS. of this volume. Some of this was utilised in the text; other portions are unintelligible without the intended illustrations; others, again, are only jottings and memoranda, which he did not work up; but a good deal remains which is in a finished form, and which will be found of interest, either as supplementing passages in the text, or as assisting the visitor to Venice in his examination of the monuments. These additional passages are given in Appendix 11 (p. 289). The account of the Venetian Tombs culminates in the third chapter with the description of some of the latest monuments (pp. 147-150), and this is followed by an analysis of the Grotesque spirit, in order to illustrate further “the various characters of mind which brought about the destruction of the Venetian nation.”² At this point, the story ends; “The Fall” is accomplished.

But the volume contains a conclusion in another sense of the term, and also a résumé. The formal résumé is given, where readers might not expect to find it-in a note prefixed to the Venetian Index (see below, pp. 356-358), and indeed its inclusion there was an afterthought on the author’s part. It occurred to him at the last moment, as the following message to his father shows:-

“(GLENFINLAS), August 23, 1853.-... After sending away the sheets for press yesterday it struck me that with the indices it might not be inexpedient to add a kind of sketch of the contents of the book; for the Reviewers whose notices I have hitherto read do not in the least seem to apprehend the length and breadth of it, and my friend in the

¹ See below, p. 85.

² See below, p. 357.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]