The Stones of John Ruskin's Venice

The Stones of John Ruskin’s Venice

            In the middle of the nineteenth century John Ruskin, a renowned art historian, critic and intellectual, wrote a three volume book on Venetian art and architecture entitled The Stones of Venice. Within this highly detailed account of Venetian art history, Ruskin incorporated – via his peculiar rhetorical style – a bold and, at least to modern readers, controversial commentary on a variety of topics including Christian doctrine, social ethics, division of labor and class distinction. Ruskin dedicates a significant portion of The Stones of Venice to an in-depth analysis of Gothic architecture, providing a stark contrast to both previous Romano-Byzantine and later Renaissance styles with impressive familiarity. It is this artistic contrast that behaves as a vehicle not only for his brilliant interpretations, but also his provocative rhetorical extrapolations expressed through the prism of his devout Christian worldview.

            In order to understand Ruskin’s analysis of Romano-Byzantine, Gothic and Renaissance architecture, one must first attempt to understand the philosophical center from which he launches his evaluations. Informed by a deeply religious commitment to his understanding of Christianity, Ruskin’s worldview impresses certain core values and beliefs about humanity onto every criticism and analysis. History, within the worldview he’s constructed, can and should be read as a “progress of corruption” where the values of a more pious past are to be valued well above the attempts at perfection of the present. This reading of history influences The Stones of Venice from the very beginning, where Ruskin makes his first claim that there were, in all of history, three “thrones” over the ocean: one in the ancient commercial city of Tyre, one in the medieval commercial city of Venice and the last in the modern commercial empire of England (139). In writing about Venetian history – via the powerful medium of art and architecture – Ruskin hopes to ward of the same ruinous fate for England that befell the Most Serene Republic. Starting from the belief that Venetian fortunes were tied to the spirit of individual Christian piety, Ruskin can boldly break with historical convention and claim that the initial turning-point for Venice’s declension paradigm began in 1418, a full 100 years earlier than the consensus provided by contemporary scholars (141-142). Out from his Christendom-centric vision of the world, Ruskin draws a particularly interesting interpretation of the collapse of the old Roman Empire at the hands of the “Lombard” in the north and west, and the “Arab” in the south and east. This appears to indicate to Ruskin that God positioned Venice as “the golden clasp of the girdle of the Earth” both artistically and geographically (155). Even more than the central geography of the lagoon, Ruskin claims that the Ducal palace of Venice is “the central building of the world” as it incorporates Romano-Byzantine, Lombard and Arab elements (146).

            As immediately as the reader becomes acquainted with his brilliant rhetorical and interpretive ability, he is also immediately confronted with the ferocity of Ruskin’s writing style. Ruskin, for all of his critical genius, is both overly confident in the veracity of his own claims, often appearing haughty and boastful to his readers and dismissing any potential criticism of his own ideas as unconscionable. Indeed – while they would appear to be on completely opposite ends of the theological spectrum – John Ruskin’s elite rhetorical skill and apparent egomania are remarkably similar to contemporary thinker, Friedrich Nietzsche. Like Nietzsche, Ruskin’s subjective opinions of artistic taste are touted as objective fact and, despite how colorfully interwoven they are, he diverts and digresses into an excessive number of tangents wholly unrelated to the topic-at-hand. Unlike Nietzsche, however, Ruskin imports his deeply religious commitment to Christian metaphysics into his artistic criticism when he claims, “accurately speaking, no good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of misunderstanding the ends of art… This for two reasons, both based on everlasting laws… no great man ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure… [and] imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life” (183-184). These metaphysically imported artistic truths act as the guideposts for all of the claims Ruskin makes with regard to Gothic and Renaissance art.

            While there does not appear to be – in Ruskin’s outlook – a particularly Gothic style per se, there a school of thought and a collection of values that, when seen in architecture, one can identify as Gothic (170). While these stylistic and design elements don’t necessitate Gothic architecture simply on their own, Ruskin argues that in their common employment in architecture, the style is invoked. Ruskin’s style elements are Savageness, Changefulness, Naturalism, Grotesqueness, Rigidity and “Redundance” [sic], and the design elements are pointed arches, buttresses and vaulted roofs, etc. (171). Explaining that the term “Gothic” was initiated as a derogative or pejorative to indicate the “barbaric” and “savage” style that replaced Roman architecture in Europe, Ruskin immediately explains to his reader that it was inspired by a deeply and fundamentally pious adherence to Christianity (172, 175). This Gothic Christianity, as Ruskin understands it, is a religious system that asserts the value of every soul (176). By way of a very drawn-out explanation, Ruskin informs his reader that Gothic art and architecture follows several essential thematic values: a lack of symmetrical or mathematical “perfection”, abundance of ornamentation and decoration and an appreciation for the natural world (particularly organic vegetation). He believed that the Gothic style allowed for individual artistic expression and celebrated, at an unconscious level, the imperfection of human art as homage to the Biblical claim of mortal imperfection (184). This freedom of Gothic-era builders and artisans to produce art as best they could within their own individual expression was “essential” and one of the most powerful representations of Gothic artistic freedom was the quasi-random, asymmetrical and – in some cases – “organic” structure of cathedrals. This asymmetrical, ornamented and naturalistic building style stood, to Ruskin, as a paragon of defiance in the face of servility imposed upon “good and ordinarily intelligent men” by the Renaissance (208).

            In the devout world of John Ruskin, rationalism corrupted everything (149). Calling back to his idea that history is a “progress of corruption,” Ruskin reminds the reader of Venice’s centrality in God’s ordained geography when claims that Venice represents both the paragon of Christian piety and the renegade departure from it (149). In modern times, he laments that the Basilica of San Marco is uninspiring, that no one even stops to notice it or marvel at it, reinforcing his belief that modernity is an increasingly godless product of rationalist Renaissance principles (148, 168). The celebration of classical figures and mathematical precision is, to Ruskin, highly offensive and does not allow for the beautiful imperfection that was so abundant in Gothic architecture (177). Drawing from his post-abolition values of human liberty, Ruskin claims that imposing any requirements of perfection on any man – mathematical or otherwise – is akin to same kind of slavery whose last bastion was overthrown in Christendom (178). Renaissance-era dependence on mathematics and a classically ideal concept of perfection makes, to Ruskin, a cold, calculated and mechanical sort of art unfit for a pious heart (197). In short, his disapproval of Renaissance art stems from a belief that the methodical and mathematical norms of classical and Renaissance art have “silenced the independent language of the operative” (212).

            Methodologically speaking, Ruskin’s genius is not only in studying texts and paintings, but in allowing individual ornaments, tombs and common infrastructure to inform his understanding of history in lieu of written records which do not survive as easily. In the end, his image of Venetian history is one of unfulfilled promise. Early Venice couldn’t fully develop its own Gothic character because of its cultural indebtedness to Byzantine inspiration, but by the time they had developed an entirely independent cultural ethos, the poisonous rationalism of the Renaissance had begun to pervert the artistic minds of Venetians (215). This progress of corruption was evident, to Ruskin, in the city’s Byzantine-era influence being coupled with a “serious, religious, and sincere” character, progressing into a “comparatively deprived” version of Gothic and into a third phase of Renaissance, heralding its “ruin” in the same fashion of the “Cities of the Plain” like Gomorrah (216, 217, 139).