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Joseph Woods Letters from an Architect, was written 1827, and first published 1828, third edition 1847. Woods was a Quaker, an unsuccessful architect (his firm got into financial difficulties when a building in Mincing Lane collapsed because of a miscalculation of the load bearing properties of the iron frame).
His account of Venice reads like a parody of Stones of Venice, except that it was published in 1828:
By arriving in the dark I lost the distant view of Venice, but I am informed by my companions here that it presents merely the line of buildings, without any prominent object, and consequently is not fine.
The morning after my arrival I repaired to the place of St. Mark, which I entered by a sudden turn under some arcades, and on the first burst it appeared to me the most magnificent thing.
However the ugliness soon became obvious. Woods objects to the ‘lumpy forms’, of St Marks, and its ‘enormous ugly ill shaped domes’, and the ‘Ducal palace is even more ugly than anything I have previously mentioned’. Of St. Marks he writes:
The exterior of this church surprises by its extreme ugliness more than by anything else. It is of two perfectly distinct styles. The lower belongs to that degraded Roman which we call Norman adorned with numerous little columns and abounding in ornament, but the ornaments are merely such; neither forming nor interrupting the lines of the architecture, but entirely subordinate to them. On the contrary the finishings of the upper parts are of the Italian Gothic of the fifteenth century, much resembling in form our own monumental architecture in the early part of the period but without its lightness; and the enrichments are excessively heavy and overcharged, so that the architecture seems to be made for them rather than they for the building. A number of figures start up among the terminating pinnacles. Still then the magnificence is produced by the exhibition of riches and power, and not the just proportion in the different parts; and this sentiment is increased upon a nearer approach, where we contemplate the multitude of columns of porphyry, verd antique, and other precious materials, the profusely ornamented capitals, and the rich mosaics on a gold ground which decorate even the external arches...
The capitals are nearly all different, all in bad taste, and disproportioned to the columns...I was disappointed to find no good ones among this number...
A most curious work might be formed by an analysis of the various fragments of which the church is composed but it would take months to mark all its intricacies...
To recapitulate then the leading parts of my observation on this famous place, its effect is produced by the impression of power and riches everywhere displayed, and by a certain justness of proportion (the result of accident, not of design) in the great masses. Take away the appearance of riches and power and nothing remains; take away the justness of proportion and you would have nothing that pleases. The union of the two is necessary to produce the impression which everybody feels and nobody can tell why. (Woods (1828) I pp.255ff)
Woods’ views on Palladio and Vicenza were, for much the same reasons, quite different from those of Ruskin, and these are the views reflected in Murray (1847b).
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[Version 0.05: May 2008]