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The diary entry of Saturday 6th October (though there is evidence that some of it was written significantly later) seems to derive from a on the front free endpaper of Notebook N.
Ruskin’s acknowledged aim on this journey was to show the falsity of Woods’ opinions on the ugliness of St. Mark’s and the Ducal Palace, that there were laws which would settle the argument with Woods and those who agreed with him in their reviews of Seven Lamps of Architecture, and demonstrate the superiority of Gothic to the Palladian style favoured by Woods.
On 6th October, in Dijon and after the visit to Vitteaux, Ruskin begins by analysing ‘families and schools of Gothic’ and examples of their ‘degradation’. There are national styles, French, English and Italian; within Italy the Gothic of Giotto achieved perfection, while the Gothic of Venice was merely a domestic school. There are styles distinguished by differences in the relationship between mass and line. The grotesque of the North is opposed to Italian dignity and rest. However, degradation everywhere is produced by the mistaken pursuit of new styles seen in English perpendicular and continental flamboyant, in the Certosa of Pavia in Italy, and in France in Gisors and ‘parts of Beauvais, and the perpendicular foliation of Troyes’.
In this entry Ruskin associates the degradation 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 of a building, ‘wall, roof, door, and window’. There are references, many of them developed in Volume I of Stones of Venice, to: wall; pillar; pier; veil; buttress; lintel; gable; arch; abacus; bell; base; shaft; frieze; cornice; roof; aperture / window/ door; dripstone; superimposition / string course / involved.
Ruskin’s task is made more difficult by the fact that much of the vocabulary of architecture derives from Vitruvius, through Alberti, Palladio, and, in Britain at least, Chambers. It is a vocabulary and a set of concepts which apply primarily to classical, not Gothic, architecture. Ruskin drew much from Willis (1835), but Willis (1844) argued the case that the nomenclature of medieval architecture was uncertain: craftsmen were more used to working with stone than words. Ruskin draws concepts from Rickman (1817), but even though Paley (1845) had been published in 1845 there is no explicit reference to it in the Notebooks or in Ruskin’s published works. The functionalist approach of Willis, for whom the attraction of Gothic is the clarity with which it reveals structural forces, is reflected in the note of October 6 1849, but seems less important to Ruskin as he works out his ideas in Venice.
In the entry of October 6 1849 there is no explicit attempt to link the architectural agenda with the religious and moral agenda outlined on Sunday 7th October. However the two are clearly linked early in the journey to Venice in Ruskin’s use of Dante’s image of Adam of Brescia in Milan Cathedral at Notebook M p.5, and towards the end of the tour on the return from Venice at Notebook M2 p.176, where infidelity, mean architecture and Palladio are associated.
Chronological sequence is obviously important to any notion of development, and to that extent Ruskin is interested in establishing dates.
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[Version 0.05: May 2008]