Ruskin records at length his impression of a visit to the Louvre in a diary entry of 8 September 1849, which reads in part:
Kingliness and Holiness and Manliness and Thoughtfulness were never by words so hymned or so embodied or so enshrined as they have been by Titian and Angelico and Veronese - so never were Blasphemy and Cruelty and Horror and degradation and decrepitude of intellect - and all that has sunk or will sink Humanity to Hell - so written in words as they are stamped upon the canvases of Salvator and Jordaens and Caravaggio and modern France.
Referring to Veronese, Ruskin writes in the same entry:
I saw at once that the whole life of the man - his religion, his conception of humanity, his reach of conscience, of moral feeling, his kingly imaginative power; his physical gifts, his keenness of eye, his sense of colour, his enjoyment of all that was glorious in nature, his chief enjoyment of that which was particularly fitted to his sympathies, his patience, his memory, his thoughtfulness, all that he was, that he had - that he could - was there: and as I glanced away to the extravagances - or meannesses, or mightinesses - that shone or shrank beneath my glance along the infinite closing of that sunset coloured corridor, I felt that painting had never yet been understood as it is, an Interpretation of Humanity.
Haskell, History and its Images, p. 309, links this insight with the beginning of Ruskin's work on The Stones of Venice, and his use of art in the exploration of issues of individual and political morality and religion.