The Stones of Venice

"Yes, it’s a neatly filleted version of The Stones of Venice . So Augustus Pugin had already written a book called Contrasts in the 1830s where he has two pictures: one of the medieval city and one of the new city. The new city is full of factories and classical, pedimented museums and town halls; the old city is Gothic towers and spires, and crocketed finials and Gothic-ry. The message is very, very clear, which is that the medieval world is a world of craftsmanship, personal fulfilment, independence, spiritual probity and commercial honesty that finds a language, a physical manifestation, in the Gothic. Ruskin, writing 15 years later, is part of that same group of thinkers who are obsessed with medieval ways. William Morris, as well, is tackling that. Ruskin says that even to work on classical buildings must have been a diminishing experience. He writes about how awful it must have been to carve the dentils on a cornice (the little teeth that go along it) because all creativity would be killed by doing this job. Instead of a mason carving bosses in the shape of leaves or carving animal heads or wonderful gargoyles who look like your school teacher, everybody is reduced to this mechanized work. Ruskin is also making a moral religious point that saying goodbye to the Gothic is saying goodbye to God, the idea of good, and moving into the world of Mammon. Ruskin ties up the idea of the neoclassical and the Renaissance with the Industrial Revolution and an end to goodness, for want of a better word. So Ruskin writes with venom, really, about the Renaissance. He calls it evil and sinister. The Baroque is abhorrent, a monstrous wrongdoing to mankind in his mind. He’s the most intemperate man you could possibly imagine and absolutely absurd. (He was also a tricky husband to Effie, whom he was married to. He was horrified, it is said, to find pubic hair because he’d only ever seen a Greek statue of a woman. He assumed everything would be white and marbly). Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But he was a marvelous painter and an amazing thinker. His ideas were behind the Natural History Museum in Oxford being built, and the O’Shea brothers carving those extraordinary capitals. Someone would bring a plant from the botanical gardens in the morning, and these Irish masons would carve that plant into the building. A lot of those ideas about the Gothic, Ruskin cuts in Venice. He spends a lot of time drawing and measuring. He’s very careful, trying to tabulate the world. He has a lot of ideas about when arches became Byzantine, and when they became Romanesque. He is quite often quite wrong. But the idea is a powerful one, that Venice, as a Gothic city, is an act for good. His ideas then have a tremendous life in diaspora, particularly around Britain. You get buildings like Templeton Carpet Factory in Glasgow, the Meadows building at Christ Church, or St. Pancras station in London. There are a number of buildings that use the language of Venice in English architecture. It is a political thing, it is saying, ‘This is how you do good.’ Reading the whole of The Stones of Venice is unbelievably stiff and solid, but this edition is one of two or three very good, filleted versions of it with commentaries. It’s got such a bearing not just on how you read Venice, but on how you read our own built environment. There’s the Gothic Revival, which turns into the Arts and Crafts movement . It’s at the root of a lot of socialist ideas. William Morris is writing News from Nowhere at the same time as he is trying to help campaign for Venice to be looked after properly. It’s a powerful document. It’s a book that says Venice is not just a beautiful playbox, it’s also a crucible of ideas that have had a massive effect on Northern European culture and social life. The shape of 19th-century paternalistic care is Gothic and a lot of that Gothic comes from Venice. It also has quite a big effect on the art world, and just physically in that there are a lot of buildings in Manchester, Leeds or London, or indeed in northern France and in America that quote Venice. It’s not the only language that comes out of Venice. Palladianism also comes out of the Veneto and Venice, and that has its own contrasting series of influences, but that’s a separate thing."