The Stones of Venice, Volume 2 (of 3)
This is not a guidebook. It is a crusade. John Ruskin, the most formidable art critic of the Victorian age, mounts a relentless assault against the Renaissance in these pages, arguing that Venice, its Byzantine palaces and Gothic cathedrals, represents the last great flowering of honest, spiritual architecture before Europe succumbed to ornament and deception. For Ruskin, buildings are moral documents: the stonemason's craft reflects the soul of a civilization. To admire Renaissance excess is to betray the honest labor of medieval craftsmen. The prose burns with this conviction, elaborate, passionate, sometimes furious, always beautiful. Volume Two delves deep into the architectural forms that made Venice miraculous: the Byzantine influences that arrived via trade routes to the East, the pointed arches and tracery of Gothic that Northern Europe brought across the Alps. Ruskin reads every column, every capital, every mosaic as evidence of a culture's spiritual condition. Yet there is melancholy here too, the city he loves is sinking, its glories imperiled by time and modern indifference. For lovers of Venice, admirers of ferocious Victorian prose, and anyone who believes that buildings tell the truth about who we are.
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“To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality.””
— John Ruskin
“The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most.””
— John Ruskin
“Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know in life.””
— John Ruskin
“Understand this clearly: you can teach a man to draw a straight line, and to carve it; and to copy and carve any number of given lines or forms, with admirable speed and perfect precision; and you find his work perfect of its kind: but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an animated tool.””
— John Ruskin
“An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.””
— John Ruskin
“The second reason is, that imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, ridgidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom,--a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom,--is a type of the life of this world. And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyse vitality.””
— John Ruskin
“I believe that the characteristic or moral elements of Gothic are the following, placed in the order of their importance: 1. Savageness; 2. Changefulness; 3. Naturalism; 4. Grotesqueness; 5. Rigidity; 6. Redundance.””
— John Ruskin
“And now come with me, for I have kept you too long from your gondola: come with me, on an autumnal morning, to a low wharf or quay at the extremity of a canal, with long steps on each side down to the water, which latter we fancy for an instant has become black with stagnation; another glance undeceives us, --it is covered with the black boats of Venice. We enter one of them, rather to try if they be real boats or not, than with any definite purpose, and glide away; at first feeling as if the water were yielding continually beneath the boat and letting her sink into soft vacancy.””
— John Ruskin
“The mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers, and miserable workers. Now it is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.””
— John Ruskin
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Ruskin, John. The Stones of Venice, Volume 2 (of 3). Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-stones-of-venice-volume-2-of-3-aae1c3de-2d99-4a67-9eb1-2ccc72fcc4de.Ruskin, J. (n.d.). The Stones of Venice, Volume 2 (of 3). Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-stones-of-venice-volume-2-of-3-aae1c3de-2d99-4a67-9eb1-2ccc72fcc4deRuskin, John. The Stones of Venice, Volume 2 (of 3). Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-stones-of-venice-volume-2-of-3-aae1c3de-2d99-4a67-9eb1-2ccc72fcc4de.
