INTRODUCTION TO VOL. IX

The Stones of Venice (contained in Vols. IX.-XI.) is the sequel, chronologically and in subject-matter, to The Seven Lamps of Architecture. At the time when the earlier book was published, Ruskin had the later already in his mind, and had pledged himself to its production, by announcing it as “in preparation.”¹ He subsequently requested his readers to regard The Seven Lamps as only “an introduction” to the later and larger work.² In The Seven Lamps he defined certain states of moral temper which were necessary, as he maintained, to the production of good architecture. In The Stones of Venice his central theme was to illustrate from the rise and fall of Venetian architecture the working of moral and spiritual forces. “He had,” he says,³ “from beginning to end, no other aim than to show that the Gothic architecture of Venice had arisen out of, and indicated in all its features, a state of pure national faith, and of domestic virtue; and that its Renaissance architecture had arisen out of, and in all its features indicated, a state of concealed national infidelity, and of domestic corruption.” The later book may thus be said to be a particular illustration of general principles laid down in the earlier one. This is a view which Ruskin himself incidentally presents in the preface to the second edition of The Seven Lamps. He devoted his more elaborate essay to Venice, not because he desired to put forward Venetian Gothic as “the most noble of the schools of Gothic,” but because the architecture of Venice “exemplifies, in the smallest compass, the most interesting facts of architectural history.”⁴ The first volume of The Stones of Venice, entitled “The Foundations,” was concerned-after a prelude setting forth the dominant motives of the whole book-with establishing fundamental principles of criticism-gathered in the main from consideration of architectural construction-which were indeed largely illustrated from the schools of Venice, but which are also applicable to works of architecture generally.

¹ See Vol. VIII. p. li.

² Preface to 2nd edition of Seven Lamps, Vol. VIII. p. 7.

³ Crown of Wild Olive, § 65.

⁴ See Vol. VIII. p. 13.

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