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The concerns and the language are similar to those of Ruskin’s Diary entry for the 8th September 1849, less than a month earlier when Ruskin reports what he saw as a life changing experience in the Louvre:
Kingliness and Holiness and Manliness and Thoughtfulness were never by words so hymned or so embodied or so enshrined as they have been by Titian and Angelico and Veronese - so never were Blasphemy and Cruelty and Horror and degradation and decrepitude of intellect - and all that has sunk or will sink Humanity to Hell - so written in words as they are stamped upon the canvases of Salvator and Jordaens and Caravaggio and modern France.
And in the same entry:
‘I saw at once that the whole life of the man - his religion, his conception of humanity, his reach of conscience, of moral feeling, his kingly imaginative power; were there .........., I felt that painting had never yet been understood as it is, an Interpretation of Humanity.
Haskell (1993) p.309 links this insight with the beginning of the thinking which led to Stones of Venice.
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[Version 0.05: May 2008]