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M2 begins at what is now the back of the book. In the entry dated Dijon 6th Oct., (though it is not clear how much of it was written on that day) Ruskin starts from his observation in the morning of a Gothic window at Vitteaux, a village on the road to Dijon. He analyses ‘families and schools of Gothic’ and examples of their ‘degradation’. An initial version of this analysis, partly overwritten, is at Notebook N.Front free endpaper verso. In these pages he associates the decline of Gothic with the failure to accomplish the function of buildings in the ‘best, i.e. commonly simplest’ manner. His aim is to define the ‘conditions, or laws of beauty in the most refined work’ by a consideration of the necessary parts and necessary functions of a building, ‘wall, roof, door, and window’. Key concepts are: Wall; pillar; pier; veil; buttress; lintel; gable; arch; abacus; bell; base; shaft; frieze; cornice; roof; aperture / window / door; dripstone; superimposition of two kinds, that where the storeys are clearly separated by a string course, and that which is ‘involved’, without clear separation.
For Willis (1835) pp.17-18 the attraction of Gothic is the clarity with which it reveals structural forces as opposed to the buildings of Romans of earlier times. This approach is reflected in the back pages on Gothic in the note started on October 6 1849, but seems to have become less important to Ruskin as he worked out his ideas in the notebooks on his journey to and from Venice and in Venice.
Many of the ideas are developed in Stones of Venice in the subject matter of chapters of the first volume and in the details of the arguments there but these pages do not seem to have been indexed by Ruskin in his indexes at Notebook M pp.220L-224 and Notebook M2 pp.189L-198.
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[Version 0.05: May 2008]