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.
