The Stones of Venice: Volume II. The Sea-Stories

by John Ruskin

More than 150 years after its first publication in 1851–53, this monumental work by a great Victorian writer, critic, and artist remains among the most influential books on art and architecture ever written. In The Stones of Venice, a survey of the principal buildings in the "Paradise of Cities," John Ruskin developed an aesthetic and intellectual argument that lingers at the heart of the debate over the meaning of architecture and craftsmanship.
This work applies the general principles enunciated in Ruskin's The Seven Lamps of Architecture to Venetian architecture. The first volume, The Foundations, presents a short history of the city and discusses architecture's functional and ornamental aspects. Volume II, The Sea-Stories, examines the Byzantine era and the brilliant architectural developments of Venice's Gothic period. The third volume, The Fall, consists of a trenchant examination of the Venetian spiritual and architectural decline during the Renaissance.
Ruskin believed that an understanding of architecture (and painting, and nature) requires a well-informed respect for history and truth. Readers will find no better guide to the spiritual content and aesthetic pleasures of architecture than this eminent teacher and scholar. Featuring all of Ruskin's original drawings, this is the only unabridged edition of The Stones of Venice currently available.

Genres: History

448 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1886

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

John Ruskin was an English writer, philosopher, art historian, art critic and polymath of the Victorian era. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and political economy.
Ruskin was heavily engaged by the work of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc which he taught to all his pupils including William Morris, notably Viollet-le-Duc's Dictionary, which he considered as "the only book of any value on architecture". Ruskin's writing styles and literary forms were equally varied. He wrote essays and treatises, poetry and lectures, travel guides and manuals, letters and even a fairy tale. He also made detailed sketches and paintings of rocks, plants, birds, landscapes, architectural structures and ornamentation. The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art gave way in time to plainer language designed to communicate his ideas more effectively. In all of his writing, he emphasised the connections between nature, art and society.
Ruskin was hugely influential in the latter half of the 19th century and up to the First World War. After a period of relative decline, his reputation has steadily improved since the 1960s with the publication of numerous academic studies of his work. Today, his ideas and concerns are widely recognised as having anticipated interest in environmentalism, sustainability and craft.
Ruskin first came to widespread attention with the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), an extended essay in defence of the work of J.M.W. Turner in which he argued that the principal role of the artist is "truth to nature". From the 1850s, he championed the Pre-Raphaelites, who were influenced by his ideas. His work increasingly focused on social and political issues. Unto This Last (1860, 1862) marked the shift in emphasis. In 1869, Ruskin became the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford, where he established the Ruskin School of Drawing. In 1871, he began his monthly "letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain", published under the title Fors Clavigera (1871–1884). In the course of this complex and deeply personal work, he developed the principles underlying his ideal society. As a result, he founded the Guild of St George, an organisation that endures today.

Reviews

[Lisa E. · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great primary source, but difficult to find useful for contemporary readers other than as an example of past art historical style and thought. Often painfully detailed and descriptive - this approach is more successful in the illustrated analysis of ornament and architectural form than in the seemingly endless listing of the features of every column on the Ducal Palace. The latter, while essential to pre-20th-C readers who could not visit Venice, is utterly useless to an audience who now can access photographs of these works and see for themselves what Ruskin endeavors to put into words for scores of boring pages. The entire volume is very uneven in its treatment of various monuments - the Murano cathedral section is quite balanced between architectural description, aesthetic analysis, and religious interpretation, but others devolve into long subjective rants about culture or theology that say more about British society than Italian art.

[EJ Daniels · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the second volume in this famous trilogy, John Ruskin offers an extremely in-depth, if also extremely subjective, assessment of Venetian architecture during the high points of Venetian economic and imperial expansion. Emphasizing strongly the apex of Venetian artistic creativity as realized through a cosmopolitan approach to beauty, this volume neatly, perhaps too neatly, attempts to place Venetian culture as a heterogeneous amalgamation. With a critical approach typical of the Victorian Period, one will receive an excessive amount of postulating, hyperbole, and florid prose, but the result is still an extremely important and gorgeously written example of exceptional writing on architecture.

[James F · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this second volume, Ruskin turns to the architecture of Venice. After a sort of prologue dealing with the churches of Torcello and Murano, he divides the book into two parts. The first part deals with the Byzantine (Romanesque) architecture of the early Middle Ages; it begins with a long general essay on the nature of Byzantine architecture and then proceeds to the examples, St. Marks cathedral and what little ruins remain of the domestic architecture. The second and longer part begins with another long essay on the nature of Gothic architecture and then deals with the domestic architecture and a long chapter on the Ducal Palace.

Ignoring as usual the religious polemics, the book is a good introduction to Romanesque and Gothic architecture.

[ek ♡ · Rating 3 out of 5]

cured my insomnia

[Patrick Fay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Have you asked yourself - what is it about St. Marks' Square that has fascinated artists, architects and ordinary travelers for hundreds of years? If so, the second volume of Ruskin's Stones of Venice will add tremendously to your appreciation of the near perfect architecture of the two principal buildings in Venice - St. Marks and the Doges' Palace. Ruskin has a great eye for craftsmanship and the finer points of the decorations while painstakingly measuring the layout and overall design to illustrate the highly developed sense of proportion achieved by the architects of 13th and 14th century Venice. He also does an excellent job placing the buildings in context as the closest things to sacred and historical texts available to the pious and mostly illiterate 13th century population.

Although St. Marks can induce sensory overload with its wealth of mosaic and architectural decoration, Ruskin makes sense of it, describing the meaning of each mosaic and the reason for its location. He applies the same detailed analysis to the Doges' Palace comparing the style and quality of work at different locations to tease out the timeline of the construction and repairs.

Ruskin's beautiful illustrations alone are justification for picking up a copy.