xxx INTRODUCTION

some of the outskirts of the city towards the mainland. I had little conception of anything so grass-grown or melancholy-all ruined walls-neglected patches of garden surmounted by rotten stakes, or heaps of refuse and plots of waste land-heaps and banks of kneaded mud or fallen walls-not even the picturesque nets of Italy to redeem it, the look was of the kind of place in the outskirts of London which are the shrines of Warren’s blacking and Parr’s pills. I see no hope for better things-the indolence of the people is unconquerable. Mr. Brown recommended me one man as the only one who knew anything of those connected with the library in the Ducal Palace. I asked him, among other matters, whether the windows, which have now no tracery in them, ever had any. Never, he said-there was not the slightest trace of it. These windows require ladders to get up to them and are difficult in the opening-so it struck me as quite possible that nobody might have taken the trouble to look. Yesterday I went for this special purpose-got the library steps and opened all the windows, one after another, round the palace. I found the bases of the shafts of the old tracery-the holes for the bolts which had fastened it-the marks of its exact diameter on the wall-and finally, in a window at the back, of which I believe not one of the people who have written on the place know so much as the existence, one of its spiral shafts left-capital and all. The librarian asked me afterwards “whether I had found any marks;” I said, “a few traces, certainly,” but told him nothing about my spiral shaft; he may go and look himself, if he likes.

The historical records about the palace are one mass of confusion. The name of its designer is not known; the builder was said to be a man who was hanged on the pillars of it, Calendario;¹ but by other accounts he was hanged before it was built-and most of the accounts agree in proving that the top was built before the bottom. I got sick of this sort of thing, and set to work, to separate its sculpture into classes, and I have got internal evidence of six different periods of work upon it-and of more than one architect in several of the periods-these broad facts I shall give in order, and let them quarrel about who was who, as they like. I have been reading my mother’s book to-day, the use of the body in relation to the mind, with great pleasure-though it bores me with its metaphysics, which are not good enough to be worth the trouble of thinking out. Its morality is very nice.

Dearest love to her.

Ever, my dearest Father,

Your affectionate son,

J. RUSKIN.

¹ See Stones of Venice, vol. iii. appendix 1.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]