Old Venetian glassmaking offered for Ruskin one example of the superiority of the city's artistic productions over those of modern functional design. In the second volume of The Stones of Venice (1851), Ruskin uses glassmaking to posit a vital link between organic growth and artistic truth: modern manufacture, with its 'demand for perfection' and its search for 'the perfect finish', chose to ignore the lessons in organicism offered by Venetian glass workers:
Our modern glass is exquisitely clear in its substance, true in its form, accurate in its cutting. We are proud of this. We ought to be ashamed of it.. .The old Venetian cared not a whit whether his edges were sharp or not, but he invented a new design for every glass that he made... we never see the same form in it twice ( Works, 10.199-200)
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It is the 'infinite variety' in natural forms noted here which makes up a key motif of Modern Painters, a feature Ruskin tirelessly identifies in his natural descriptions and makes a marker of truth in 'great' landscape art.