Under the Ruskin Sun

On the 692nd page of the new edition of John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice (1851–53)—recently returned to print in its unabridged form for the first time since the thirty-nine-volume “Library Edition” of his complete works was issued in 1904—the great Victorian critic cuts to the chase: “I believe the architects of the last three centuries to have been wrong; wrong without exception; wrong totally, and from the foundation. This is exactly the point I have been endeavouring to prove, from the beginning of this work to the end of it.” That point, no doubt, had already been more than made: The lines quoted come after the third and final volume’s conclusion; they’re from the “explanatory note” introducing his long “Venetian Index,” an alphabetical list of buildings that finally provides something like the practical travel guide the rest of this strange book has willfully avoided.

I say “something like” because anyone hoping to use this when planning their Venetian itinerary will find that of the 130 or so additional buildings listed beyond those already discussed in the text, nearly half are marked simply with variations on the phrase “of no interest.” (Readers will, however, find a painting-by-painting analysis covering the sixty-two Tintorettos housed at the Scuola di San Rocco.) But this is only in keeping with Ruskin’s general approach, which smuggles a polemic against the Renaissance and its offspring into the form of a guide for the Grand Tour bourgeois. The Stones was written from the lagoon toward his homeland and the neoclassicism that was then its aesthetic common sense—Smirke’s British Museum, for example, first welcomed visitors in the years Ruskin was at work abroad. At stake in this argument was, more or less, the nation’s soul, and so he aimed appropriately high. Venice, once “the centre of the pure currents of Christian architecture” had become “in her decline the source of the Renaissance.” Naturally then: “It is in Venice, therefore, and in Venice only, that effectual blows can be struck at this pestilent art of the Renaissance. Destroy its claims to admiration there, and it can assert them nowhere else.”

Ruskin won, and the Gothic Revival began. His victory turned out to be a bitter disappointment. By the time he was writing the preface to the third edition in 1874, he could recount, with a mix of humor and horror, a night when, while riding from Ealing to Brentford, he “was startled by suddenly finding, between [him] and the evening sky, a piece of Italian Gothic in the style of its best time.” What was the problem? “This good and true piece of brickwork was the porch of a public house, and its total motive was the provocation of thirst, and the encouragement of idleness.” His moral intervention had been taken for an aesthetic one, a misreading so dire that he wished no one had bothered with the book at all.

That raises the obvious question of whether, and why, anyone should bother with it today. The plainest answer, one that caused Ruskin considerable grief, is for his prose. While I’ve only quoted him so far at his most severe, the moments where he falls into reverie (the passages that made him a touchstone for Proust) are as gorgeous and compelling as any descriptive writing English has offered to date. Here, for instance, is the first quarter of a 232-word sentence narrating, drunk with delight, his vision on approaching St. Mark’s:

But even the alley leading to the piazza and grand basilica receives its own rich, specific treatment; he writes a page before of walking by little workshops with “the light in all cases entering at the front only, and fading away in a few feet from the threshold into a gloom which the eye from without cannot penetrate, but which is generally broken by a ray or two from a feeble lamp at the back of the shop, suspended before a print of the Virgin.”

Part of the strangeness of The Stones emerges from how these not infrequent moments that strain the limits of criticism (if not prose itself) run up against the coldest technical and practical enumeration. His tour of San Marco continues; entering the interior, he finds overhead “a continual succession of crowded imagery, one picture passing into another, as in a dream,” before abruptly turning to a consideration of color in architecture and the importance of incrustation to best achieving it, a theoretical discussion he soon concretizes via dry laws for construction (I’m leaving out the explanations tying these specifically to colored decoration; they’re more logical than they might seem here):

These tonal swerves—in the subsequent chapter on Byzantine palaces, he moves quickly from writing on one with “a garden beside it, rich with evergreens, and decorated by gilded railings and white statues that cast long streams of snowy reflection down into the deep water” to four pages measuring the widths of arches to the inch—aren’t just a matter of Ruskin offering relief to those less technically inclined among his readers: They give The Stones the same texture, varied, contingent, and handmade, that he admired in the Venetian Gothic.

To explain that claim, I need to swerve myself and give some sense of the book’s overall shape. Again, its argument is moral: The architecture of Venice was noble when its people were noble (that is, when they were Ruskin’s idea of true Christians); it devolved into “folly and hypocrisy” when they ceased to be so. And the background to this argument, though mentioned only in passing, was half a century of revolution across Europe; he departed for Venice in 1849, as a wave of reaction was crushing every left movement the previous year had seen. Ruskin’s position here isn’t easy to situate. He disdained bourgeois capitalism (though neither word appears in The Stones) as much as he did the fading aristocracy with its “festering and insolent isolation.” He heard “the cry of the poor”—it sounds the same whether aimed at Versailles or the factory—as “mingling so much piteousness with its wrath and indignation,” but he was no revolutionary: The problem wasn’t a political economy based on extracting surplus value; it was that the average laborer had been robbed of any opportunity for thoughtful, meaningful work, had been made a living machine whose only role was producing to precise, monotonous specifications. Ruskin was writing, between the lines, against Victorian England’s industrial society to save his homeland from a revolution he knew it deserved.

(This gets at a second reason to read The Stones. If Ruskin’s atavistic anti-capitalism implied a vision for society that few on the left, then or now, could assent to, that fact does little to diminish its force: British socialism’s history, from William Morris through the best of Labour, would look very different without this book. What, if anything, remains to be learned from it today is a question I have to let haunt the rest that follows here.)

Well, as to his argument’s shape: To borrow a line about another of the era’s great critics of capitalism, the style of Ruskin is Ruskin. He had the Bible memorized before he was a teenager, and he wrote with a tone of dense, allusive conviction in his powers of persuasion that maybe only a true believer could access. But he also wanted an audience (by the time of The Stones, the first two volumes of Modern Painters had already secured his reputation as a major art critic) and set out to write “in a form clear and simple enough to be intelligible even to those who never thought of architecture before.” This is what makes “the style of Ruskin” so hard to do justice to: The bottom keeps falling out of his plainspoken didacticism, dropping the reader into depths of obscurity that somehow go on humming with the sense that an obvious point is being made—and that it’s being made as urgently as possible.

Forgive me, then, for oversimplifying, for making the book’s construction seem less weird and byzantine than it is. The Stones requires Ruskin to untangle and then weave two strands: the history of European architecture and the sociopolitical history of Venice, which culminate and converge at the flowering of the Gothic in the maritime republic. The first volume (The Foundations) begins with a chapter providing potted narratives of both before briefly stipulating best practices for construction from the ground up (from “The Wall Base” to “Superimposition”), then circling back and specifying the best forms of decoration for each. This is Ruskin at his most didactic; his stated purpose is that the reader will “never confound good architecture with bad any more.” This is also Ruskin at his most tedious: “A wall has been defined to be an even and united fence of wood, earth, stone, or metal” is a representative example of the prose here. I expect those with practical experience in the construction of buildings (I, like Ruskin, have none) will find plenty to quarrel with in these pages, though enough conceptual groundwork is laid—particularly in the chapters on decoration, where he works through his ideas on the importance of using forms derived (but not copied) from nature—the pedantry is worth it.

The second volume (The Sea-Stories) comprises two sections, covering the Byzantine and Gothic periods. In the former, Ruskin boats around the lagoon and across the early Middle Ages from Basilica of Santa Maria Assunta on the island of Torcello to the Church of Santa Maria e San Donato on Murano, finally arriving at the glory of St. Mark’s. The latter opens with the book’s most famous chapter, “On the Nature of the Gothic,” before exploring a handful of the period’s minor palazzi and concluding with the Doge’s Palace, “the central building of the world.” The third and by far the shortest volume (The Fall) breaks the declension of the Renaissance into three successive stages—Early, Roman, and Grotesque—each more degenerate than the last. Ruskin’s narration of Venice’s rise and ruin is by turns speculative and meticulous, a stream of severe and hyperbolic judgements on the city’s central civic, religious, and artistic figures. One of the main antagonists, though, isn’t exactly human: The Serrata del Maggior Consiglio, a political shift initiated in 1297 that restricted election to the Great Council (the civic body with responsibility for electing the Doge) on a hereditary basis, splits the Republic’s history in two, marking the initial sign of approaching decline. His verdict on the Doges tend toward extremes; they are either grand heroes or abject failures, and he first dates the city’s fall precisely to the date of Doge Carlo Zeno’s death, May 18, 1418 (its ill-fated pendant, the proper start of the Renaissance, comes six years later on March 27, 1424, when renovation work begins on the Ducal Palace). While Ruskin’s aesthetic judgements are, on the whole, more nuanced, his moments of vitriol are models of disdain. Looking at Palladio’s San Giorgio Maggiore: “It is impossible to conceive a design more gross, more barbarous, more childish in conception, more servile in plagiarism, more insipid in result, more contemptible under every point of rational regard.” A footnote added in 1881, meanwhile, clarifies that anything good he has to say about Michaelangelo was only the result of his being “still encumbered by the dust” of received opinion on the master.

We should finally get into the buildings. Approaching Murano, “the most discordant feature in the whole scene is the cloud which hovers above the glass furnaces; but this we may not regret, as it is one of the last signs left of human exertion among the ruinous villages which surround us.” His gondola winds its way through modern activity until he lands at the east end of Santa Maria and history takes over. Several pages of mythical, religious, and political context for the church follow, covering the period from its consecration in AD 957 until Ruskin arrives in the fourteenth century, having found no “record of any effort made by the clergy of St. Mary’s to maintain their influence by restoring or beautifying their basilica; which is the only point at present of importance to us.” From here, the remainder of the chapter is given over to examination of first its interior plan—the “proportions…of the nave and aisles might have been dictated by a mere love of mathematical precision; but those of the apse could only have resulted from a true love of harmony”—and then, at length, its façade. Ruskin moves column by column and triangle by triangle across its decoration, once again measuring to the inch to show the peculiar nature of Byzantine construction, with its just-off proportions, eccentric use of color, reverence for nature (“the same leaf continually repeated, but never twice of the same size”), and intense engagement with its specific materials. He instructs us to see—“for this is especially delightful”:

Having accounted for the exterior, Ruskin enters the church to see “what is left of interest within the walls.” In what amounts to a running theme: “All hope is taken away by our first glance.” The interior is a mess of renaissance renovations, “all vulgar, vain, and foul.” (These horrors are hardly passed; as Ruskin stands amid this wreckage, he has “the privilege of watching the candlelighter at his work, knocking his ladder about the heads of the capitals as if they had given him personal offence.”) But still he keeps at it, even returning the next day to continue his attempt at reading this built text. He can’t help but thrill to the “Greek Madonna, pictured on a field of gold” that resides in the apse and to the floors “of infinite interest” in their variegated color, their splendor harmonizing to express that “the whole edifice is…simply a temple to the Virgin: to her is ascribed the fact of Redemption, and to her its praise.” And while he rejects worshipping of Mary over God, this finally matters less than “the sense of a Divine presence,” the sense that this church was built by “nameless multitudes” who “did honour something out of themselves; they did believe in spiritual presence judging, animating, redeeming them; they built to its honour and for its habitation.”

I’ve chosen these pages on Murano more or less at random; Ruskin’s method is consistent across each building. In the chapter on the Doge’s Palace, for example, he reads the sculptural decorations of the capitals atop the thirty-six columns along its south and west façades, beginning with the exquisite Gothic originals on the south and moving toward the absence of religious and artistic spirit he finds in the Renaissance copies that replaced a number on the west destroyed during its fifteenth-century renovation. Whether this approach is convincing in the end—much of it depends upon dating that’s been disputed more or less from the moment of publication (the heavily expanded annotations that editor William C. McKeown provides for the edition offer both a number of corrections and a deep reading list for those who care to venture fully into the historical weeds)—the sheer vehemence of his argument and the dogged, almost mad attention that subtends it make The Stones a singular piece of criticism. That this attention was both intensified and refined by the long hours Ruskin spent drawing the objects of his study points to another reason to recommend this new edition: Its illustrations, all from Ruskin’s own hand, are remarkable and presented in uniformly excellent reproductions. Who could begin to estimate how much the quality of criticism today, across the visual arts, might improve if every critic learned to draw so precisely?

Ruskin knew he wasn’t a born artist, but he worked to make the craft of his drawing adequate to his purposes; we profit from this work as much as he did. And this ethic of craftsmanship, with its valorization of imperfection, returns us to the heart of the Gothic. While The Stones does provide clear instructions for periodizing buildings based on things as obvious as the construction of their walls, the shape of the arches, etc., these details matter less than the cultural sensibilities each era expresses. Ruskin’s moral argument resolves to the relationship between these sensibilities and the kinds of labor they entailed. The Byzantine was capable of a limited perfection: Its forms and decoration “gave to the lower workman no subject which he could not perfectly execute”; they could be satisfied in this, sure, but only so much. The Renaissance, its faith curdled to lip service, lost its way through the hubris of questing for a perfection beyond nature’s: Invention became the exclusive realm of geniuses (who were, anyway, cold and hypocritical) marshaling the multitudes to dully carry out their vision. Only the Gothic—as the pinnacle of Christian architecture—recognizes “the individual value of every soul.” That recognition is grounded in a chastening humility for Christianity tout court, which “confesses its imperfection, in only bestowing dignity upon the acknowledgment of unworthiness.” We might well leave aside the church, as Ruskin would come to do himself, and still find this an edifying vision against our own culture of ruthless perfection and optimization: “It is, perhaps, the principal admirableness of the Gothic schools of architecture, that they thus receive the results of the labour of inferior minds; and out of fragments full of imperfection, and betraying that imperfection in every touch, indulgently raise up a stately and unaccusable whole.”

Those lines come from Ruskin’s consideration of the first of his six “moral elements” of the Gothic builder, “Savageness or Rudeness.” (The remaining five: “Love of Change,” “Love of Nature,” “Disturbed Imagination,” “Obstinacy,” and “Generosity.”) Summarizing his elaborations of each is next to impossible, but the names alone are enough to paint a touching self-portrait of their author and his aspirations. And so I can answer a question left open earlier: The Stones of Venice is not a perfect book, which is the point. It’s a mirror for what moved Ruskin, those buildings made up of the most deeply felt shortcomings of human capacity. How rare for any writer, let alone one of Ruskin’s power, to recognize that not every sentence or idea will be their best, and stranger still, to recognize that this might be to their advantage in an argument for the dignity of every human soul. There’s a word for that, the last of Ruskin’s characteristics, which at its noblest amounts for him to “a magnificent enthusiasm, which feels as if it never could do enough to reach the fulness of its ideal.” There: one last reason to pick up The Stones.