Status Updates From Ruskin's Venice: The Stones...

I am amused by how much Ruskin dislikes the styles from the Renaissance. He only tolerates those Renaissace which are not Renaissance, namely those influenced by Byzantine or by Gothic.

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..and its burning legends written, than in lifting the rocks of granite higher than the clouds of heaven, and veiling them with their various mantle of purple flower and shadowy pine.

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Sometimes when walking at evening on the Lido, whence the great chain of the Alps, crested with silver clouds, might be rising above the front of the Ducal Palace, I used to feel as much in awe in gazing on the buildings as on the hills, and could believe that God had done a greater work in breathing into the narrowness of dust the mighty spirits by whom its haughty walls had been raised,

Such beautiful capitals.

Trajan doing justice to the widow. He is riding spiritually, his mantle blown out behind; the widow kneeling before his horse.This is of peculiar interest in its relation to the question of the character of the later government in Venice. It is the assertion of its belief that Justice only could be the foundation of its stability; as these stones of Justice and Judgement as the foundation of its halls of council.

The most characteristic sentiment ..in the working of the Gothic heart, was the frank confession of its own weakness;...the results of our inquiry... to state that the principal element in the Renaissance spirit is its firm confidence in its own wisdom.

Extraordinary sculpture in the Ducal Palace.

And now onto the Ducal Palace.

I can't wait to read Ruskin's opinion.

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It was also in the Hotel Danieli where Marcel Proust stayed when he visited Venice.

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Palazzo Nani-Mocenigo (now Hotel Danieli)

A glorious example of the central Gothic, nearly contemporary with the fines parts of the Ducal palace....

From 1822, the second floor of the old palace was occupied by the Hotel Danieli where Ruskin stayed with his parents in 1835. The proprietor, Joseph Dal Niel acquired the rest of the building in 1840, and reopened it as the Danieli in 1845.

"Church of the Carità:

Once an interesting gothic church of the thirteenth century, lately defaced. The effect of its ancient façade may partly be guessed at from the pictures of Canaletto, but only guessed at; Canaletto being less to be trusted than the rudest and most ignorant painter of the thirteenth century.

The palaces built between the final cessation of the Byzantine style, about 1300, and the date of the Ducal Palace (1320-1350), are all completely distinct in character.. and there is literally no transitional form between them and the perfection of the Ducal Palace. Every Gothic building in Venice which resembles the latter is a copy of it.

The principal circumstance which marks the seriousness of the early Venetian mind is perhaps the last in which the reader would suppose it was traceable: that love of bright and pure colour which, in a modified form, was afterwards the root of all the triumph of the Venetian school of painting, but which in its utmost simplicity, was characteristic of the Byzantine period only....

The peacock, used in preference to every other bird, is the well-known symbol of the Resurrection; and when drinking from a fountain or from a font, is I doubt not, also a type of the new life received in faithful baptism..

And well may they fall back, for beyond those troops of ordered arches there rises a vision out of the earth, and all the great square seems to have opened from it in a kind of awe, that we may see it far away --a multitude of pillars and white domes, clustered into a long low pyramid of coloured light; a treasure heap, it seems, partly of gold, and partly of opal and mother-of-pearl, hollowed beneath into five great

8th January 1852 - I don't think the Ducal Palace will stand 50 years more, its capitals are so rent and worn.

Luckily for us, Ruskin was wrong.

But he was visiting in the aftermath of the Venetian revolt against the Austrian rule...

8th January 1852 - I don't think the Ducal Palace will stand 50 years more, its capitals are so rent and worn.

Luckily for us, Ruskin was wrong.

But he was visiting in the aftermath of the Venetian revolt against the Austrian rule...

He interpreted what he saw as being symptomatic of the virtues and vices of the architects and their craftsmen, qualified by the moral fibre of the period in which they were working.

Starting at the beginning again.

..no amount of illustration or eulogium would be enough to make the reader understand the perfect beauty of the thing itself, as the sun steals from interstice to interstice of its marble veil, and touches with the white lustre of its rays at midday the pointed leaves of its thirsty lilies.

I think this is going to be a five star book.