Overview

Ruskin is not interested in writing a history of Venice, much less a tourist guide. His primary concern in the notebooks is with architectural forms, including sculptural decoration, and with the moral and social context of those forms.

M, M2, and the small notebooks are all essentially working books. There are a few occasions when Ruskin explicitly reflects on his own feelings and attitudes: in the mountains when he refers to his old friend the cleft-stone and remarks on the oppressive heat (Notebook M p.4), and in Verona where he writes of the most happy forenoon he spent measuring the upper story of one of the Scala monuments (Notebook M p.23). There is a reference to meeting his wife, Effie, when he ‘got chilled’ as he was drawing and ‘ran away to the Rialto’, and looked at the Tyrolean Alps with her (Notebook M p.43). There is only one other reference to her, at Notebook M2 p.166. He describes a visionary experience in St Mark’s Square (Notebook M p.76). There is also a long passage on baptism. He read of the Gorham judgment when he was in Avignon, and set out ‘the principles of right judgment which a man of candour belonging by education to neither party could hardly fail to acknowledge’ (Notebook M2 p.40). At Notebook M p.108 there is an insight into his religious thinking with a comment about saintliness which is either ironic or unfortunate.

But the focus is the detailed study of the buildings he had seen. There is much that is visual in the notebook and the worksheets, places where drawings are used to make a point that words cannot make, but also passages of description, what Waldstein (1894) called the ‘phaenomenology of nature’ (p.62), ‘word-painting’, using linguistic means to ‘render’ the paintings which he did not make (p.84 and p.90). And beyond the visual there is the mathematical - a great deal of detailed measurements of what he has observed, and as he checks through the diary an insistence on what is precisely right, or exactly life size, and what might be misleading. ‘I see my error now - I have drawn the series of lines parallel with the side of the hexagon...with this alteration and taking the following measures it will be right’ (Notebook M p.27). And see Notebook M p.51L for evidence of remarkable consistency in his measurements.

As well as cross-references to sheets and small notebooks, there are side headings and top headings picking out particular themes or issues, and presumably added later - ‘porches’, ‘capitals’, ‘piers’, ‘abstraction of ornament’, ‘Prout’s manner’, ‘masonry joints’, ‘cinquecento shafts’. He is, as it were, organising a data base of his journeys.

There is the physical journey between France and Italy. That is also a journey through the history of architecture from the arch at Orange to the Cathedral at Bourges (Notebook M2 p.176) and the character of people, from the ‘polenta eating Italians’ to the physical energy of the work of the ‘carnivorous’ north (Notebook M2 p.172). He wants to follow the ‘stream’ of Italian Gothic from Pisa (Notebook M p.47) and the ideals of Giotto’s Campanile at Florence, to examine its true nature, its relationship to other national styles, and the reasons for its degradation into the Milan Cathedral or the Certosa of Pavia, or the dereliction of the ‘Remer house’. It is the journey between the apse of the Frari on one side of the road and the Scuola di San Rocco on the other. That journey is associated with a psychological journey from the purity and stability of the ice of Montanvert to the ‘melancholy’ and the ‘banks of grey slime’ (Notebook M p.86) of the Venetian Lagoon. Ruskin first read Dante in 1845, and Dante’s journey from darkness to light was used by Ruskin in these notebooks.

In Seven Lamps of Architecture at Works, 8.206 Ruskin had referred to Woods’ opinions on the ugliness of St. Mark’s and the Ducal Palace. At Works, 9.55f Ruskin argued that such judgments, by Woods, and by those who agreed with him in their responses to Seven Lamps of Architecture, were the result of distortions caused by the Renaissance. He argued, moreover, that it was wrong to see it as ‘completely a subject of opinion’. Ruskin had ‘always a clear conviction that there was a law in this matter: good architecture might be indisputably discerned and divided from the bad’. He had set himself to establish the law and had found the task simpler than he had hoped (Works, 9.56). For Woods in 1828 (Woods (1828) Vol. 1, page 238f), Palladio was the first architect of the modern world, whose work pleased ‘universally’, and so provided a standard against which St. Mark’s and the Ducal Palace were to be judged. At Verona Book p.40 the work of Palladio is ‘utterly vile’, and the principles Ruskin established ‘indisputably’ divided the vileness of Palladio from the good, as defined by the best of Gothic.

Ruskin is interested in drawing on evidence collected on this journey to define: the nature of Gothic, its moral and architectural strength; the development of Venetian Gothic as a result of the meeting of Christian Roman and Byzantine traditions, the Arab school, and the Lombard school; and the circumstances of the degradation of Gothic. Venice provided a convenient site for the study of the evolution of Gothic, with evolution defined not in a Darwinian sense but in the sense of gradually giving substance to underlying principles, and for the study of its decline.

Ecclesiastical and secular Gothic were seen as distinct (Works, 9.43). At Verona Book p.39 Ruskin cites the Foscari and the Frari as examples of the difference. On the same page he cites St. Mark’s and Palazzo Loredan to make the point that in the Byzantine / Romanesque period the distinction did not exist. Similarly at Verona Book p.39 the style of Renaissance secular buildings such as the Ca’ Dario and of Renaissance religious buildings such as the Miracoli church was essentially the same.

Ecclesiastical Gothic in Venice was formed from the Venetian-Arab by the influence of Dominican and Franciscan architecture, notably SS Giovanni e Paolo and the Frari, particularly the traceries of the Frari, seen by Ruskin as its most novel features. Secular Gothic in Venice was ‘rich, luxuriant and entirely original’. The style is represented by the Ducal Palace and other principal Gothic palaces (Works, 9.43). Ruskin’s Venetian Index gives some indication of what Ruskin saw as the principal Gothic palaces and many of the Gothic palaces mentioned in the Venetian Index are examined in the notebooks.

In Dijon in the first diary entries of his journey to Venice he sets out an architectural agenda dated 6th October (Notebook M2 p.1back) and a religious and moral agenda in the entry dated 7th October (Notebook M p.1); in Milan the Duomo provides an antithesis to the strengths of the Ducal Palace in Venice; on his return journey from Venice his observations in Lombardy, in Genoa and in France provide an opportunity to reflect on his judgments of Venetian architecture.

Chronological sequence is obviously important to any notion of development, and to that extent Ruskin is interested in establishing dates, not least the dates of the Ducal Palace and its rebuilding after fire. He draws heavily on Zanotto’s volume of Venezia e le sue lagune (Zanotto (1847)) for the dating of houses and churches, and also on Selvatico (1847). Rawdon Brown and Lorenzi seem to have provided Ruskin with his archival evidence. Tombs are often dated and provide for him another source of evidence for relating chronological sequence, architectural form, and moral judgments about the occupant of a tomb or the circumstances in which it was made.

[Version 0.05: May 2008]