Section 1, Chapter 5, from "The Legend of Time: "Paradise of Cities"" from the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
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uskin's Venetian tragedy takes place in five acts, in which the early periods and the Byzantine (with their imagery of water and treasure) correspond to rising action, the Gothic the turning point (since, rather mysteriously, we are told that the Fall issues from a weakening of Gothic strength), and the Roman and Grotesque Renaissance the falling action. Throughout the second volume Ruskin continually reminds us of the Fall by juxtaposing past and present in the mythic and ironic [117/118] modes. Venetian piety, on the one hand, is represented by anima figures -- the interceding Virgin of Murano, the Bride of St. Mark's, and of course the queen of the seas herself -- and each has her antithesis. In Murano the people worship a Romanist idol, a more wretched relative of the stuffed Pope in Past and Present: "With rouged cheeks and painted brows, the frightful doll stands in wretchedness of rags, blackened with the smoke of the votive lamps at its feet." Beneath the original figure in the apse stands the inscription, "Whom Eve destroyed, the pious Virgin Mary redeemed" (X, 68). In "St. Mark's" the shops contain prints of the Virgin presiding over heaps of produce, while in the Piazza itself are "vendors of toys and caricatures," the idle middle classes reading empty journals, and above all the "unregarded children" standing before the sculptured Bride, who curse and quarrel, "clashing their bruised centesimi upon the marble ledges of the church porch" (X, 84-85). In Murano the rag doll Virgin is a prostitute to debased religious desires. The Bride of St. Mark's, proclaiming the treasure of Wisdom, is opposed by the madonna of the melons, an unredeemed Eve presiding as a goddess of traffic. And the treasure heap of the church is opposed by the "bruised centesimi," signifying that the money changers are in the temple -- and the pigeons have nothing to do with the Holy Spirit (Rosenberg, 91-92). The figure of the city herself as harlot -- the image of commerce sexualized -- needs no comment. But the most forceful antithesis of all is the portrait of the bead factory in "The Nature of Gothic," in which the integrity of spiritual energies in Gothic -- the fulfillment and union of head, heart, and hand -- meets its opposite in the modern workers, "small fragments and crumbs of life," who as slaves of labor are condemned to enact not their own sins, like Dante's lost souls, but the primal sin of Renaissance self-division. All day they chop glass rods into proliferating bits, "their hands vibrating with a perpetual and exquisitely timed palsy, and the beads dropping beneath their vibrations like hail" (X, 196-197).
The Renaissance is for Ruskin primarily a split between head and heart. In terms of architectural ornament, he imagines this as a splitting of the language of types (the union of head and heart) into the extremes of blank walls and obscene ornament. The first of these[118/119]expresses what Ruskin calls pride of knowledge. As the six characteristics of Gothic all flow from the first, a confession of imperfection, so do the four characteristics of the Renaissance spirit -- Pride of Science, Pride of State, Pride of System, and Infidelity -- flow from pride of knowledge. Upon the sweet imperfection of burgeoning forms that was Gothic at its finest (which had, however, started to weaken on its own) descends the unnatural, schoolmasterly restraint of Renaissance perfection -- a cold, haughty, joyless spirit without life or virtue or belief. The new architecture overwhelmed the older sculptured gardens with blank pediments and monotonous geometry. The result was a violent reaction in the disordered soul of Venice. Deprived of the pleasures that were natural and innocent, the Venetians loaded down their marble salons with sensual images until, in the late stages of decline, they turned to an art of debauchery and depravity -- what Ruskin calls the "Grotesque Renaissance," "a spirit of brutal mockery and insolent jest, which, exhausting itself in deformed and monstrous sculpture, can sometimes be hardly otherwise defined than as the perpetuation in stone of the ribaldries of drunkenness" (XI, 135). To this wreck we owe the modern factory system, the great prisonlike cities, the deadness of neoclassicism in art, and a great many other evils, general and specific.
Ruskin's unifying image of the Renaissance spirit is an organism cut off at the roots (or rather from the nourishment that surrounds it), so that, sapped gradually of its life energy, it makes more and more desperate compensations. The initial loss expresses itself as austerity and infidelity, which express themselves as knowledge. In one passage he compares the first excited acquisition of knowledge to "the casting of that deep sea-line" and the mere possession of information for its own sake as an encumbrance:
For one effect of knowledge is to deaden the force of the imagination and the original energy of the whole man: under the weight of his knowledge he cannot move so lightly as in the days of his simplicity.... And the whole difference between a man of genius and other men...is that the first remains in great part a child, seeing with the large eyes of children, in perpetual wonder, not conscious of much knowledge, -- conscious, rather, of infinite ignorance, and yet infinite power; a fountain of eternal admiration, delight, and creative force within him, meeting the ocean of visible and governable things around him. [XI, 65-66]
What has been cut off, in other words, is the emotional life, along with the heart and eyes, which are the organs of the spirit. With the feelings destroyed, the reason, working in isolation, becomes "heartless" or aggressive in its relations to the world rather than absorptive. For example, the proud technique of Renaissance painting, founded on the sciences of anatomy and perspective, treats the objects of representation sadistically, as things to be "measured, and handled, dissected and [119/120] demonstrated" (IX, 61). Deprived of strength and connection, the self also turns ravenous; but since it can no longer incorporate the world as part of a nourishing whole, it attempts to appropriate things by numbering and possessing, and "knowledge" becomes the mental form of this appropriation. We can notice this point most easily by seeing how images from earlier sections of the book are deformed by the Renaissance mind, particularly the images of food, stones, the word, and the body.
Among the early Venetians, the vine was the type of spiritual nourishment, flowing in instinctive self-regulation. Knowledge is a form of mental food and like all food can be used or abused. The proud man commits the "old Eve-sin," stuffing himself or hoarding like a human "granary," even to the point of starving himself by disuse. The soul ought not to be "dead walls encompassing dead heaps of things known and numbered" but "running waters in the sweet wilderness of things unnumbered and unknown" (XI, 64-66). Paradoxically, to hoard or number is to reduce one's store -- to insist on one's territorial isolation from the communal wealth -- since to say "mine" is to mark out an infinity that is "not mine." The "dead walls" lead to the second image, stones. Renaissance architecture is mere heaping together of geometrical regularities, but it has decoration of a sort -- inscriptions boasting of vain achievements, coats of arms, huge effigies. But the great architecture of Venice spoke through the life and color of its stones proclaiming no less forcefully than the vine itself the union of man with the works of God. Another kind of stone that men hoard is money. Knowledge, Ruskin says, is like "current coin," of which one may be proud if it is earned. But pride of knowledge is like money begged and collected, not earned -- it is a possession not truly one's own, an excrement, and this Ruskin opposes to the child's first discovery of things (XI, 72-73), which is spontaneous and so partakes of the infinite depths. Ruskin does not develop this suggestive contrast, but money is as expressive of the Renaissance spirit as food is, since pride of knowledge is really spiritual miserliness or compensatory avarice -- numbering, possessing, hiding, stuffing the things that in themselves cannot nourish or give life.
Third, the Renaissance deforms the nature of words, making grammar the first of the sciences and reducing human knowledge to a series of grammars: "the whole mind of the world was occupied by the exclusive study of Restraints.... all the acts, thoughts, and workings of mankind, -- poetry, painting, architecture, and philosophy, -- were reduced by them merely to so many different forms of fetter-dance" (XI, 115). By considering language as a system of objects to be analyzed and classified, not as a living means of interchange with the world, the Renaissance treats communication as the miser treats money he cannot [120/121] spend or the glutton food he cannot digest, once again breaking connections with the infinite. But in her great days Venice was, as I have said, the meeting point of the natural elements in symbolic human speech. The antithesis of grammar is the Symbol -- the meeting of finite and infinite.
By recoil, the insatiable hunger turns at last to lust. And so the body is the fourth and climactic image deformed by the Renaissance. In his discussion of the language of Types in "Early Renaissance," Ruskin compares the materials of the builder with the human body: "the crystalline strength and burning colour of the earth from which we were born and to which we must return; the earth which, like our own bodies, though dust in its degradation, is full of splendour when God's hand gathers its atoms; and which was forever sanctified by Him...when He bade the high priest bear the names of the Children of Israel on the clear stones of the Breastplate of Judgment" (XI, 41-42). The human body, like the sanctified earth, is an emblem of purity, that is, of organic energy, as much as water is and as much as the grass. These sentences in fact contain the densest metaphorical compression of the book, rendering water, words, stones, body, and grass or food into a single entity -- a vital circulation moving in and out of death and life, sustained by God. The ephod bearing stones as names symbolizes sanctification and covenant, paralleling the image of the rainbow, only here a man's body bears the type of God's Judgment, as the stones upon the body are the type of the sanctified community. Each of the children of God, as it were, is a stone with a meaning, an atom in the great "chord of colour" that is also the Creation.
The Renaissance version of the sanctified body Ruskin shows to us in his remarkable history of tomb sculpture. In early times the deceased is represented in repose upon a simple sarcophagus, with the symbols of Death and Salvation around him. In later times, when both death and religion are denied together, the deceased begins to rise and look about him, the angels disappear, the drapery and ornaments grow heavy and cumbrous, and the symbols bespeak earthly prowess and power. The climax of the survey is a sculptural group sixty or seventy feet high, a pile of yellow and white marble capped by a Dogaressa who is "a consummation of grossness, vanity, and ugliness, -- the figure of a large and wrinkled woman, with elaborate curls in stiff projection round her face, covered from her shoulders to her feet with ruffs, furs, lace, jewels, and embroidery" (XI, 113). "The soul of the sixteenth century dared not contemplate its body in death," Ruskin comments (XI, 110), yet the hideous Dogaressa, stuffed like a puppet, is all death -- she is the new anima of Venice, taking the place of the Virgin. The yellow and white heap is the antithesis of the facade of St. Mark's, which seems to recall, in its exuberant animation, the birth of Venice out of the sea. [121/122] But to be cut off is to die, and the Renaissance, spiritually defunct, can only affirm the fact of its mortality and more desperately it clings to life.
In the section on the final stage of decline, the "Grotesque Renaissance," Ruskin takes one final glance at the virginal Venice that has vanished forever and provides the most shocking ironic contrast of the book. The Church of Saint Mary the Beautiful was in the Middle Ages the scene of one of the loveliest of Venetian festivals, the Feast of the Maries. In Venetian tradition the Feast of the Maries was celebrated on February 2, the feast also of the Purification of the Virgin, for on this day all marriages took place. It was also, as Clegg shrewdly observes, the date of the wedding of the elder Ruskins (p. 126). The church that today stands on the site is also called Santa Maria Formosa, but it is wholly devoid of religious ornament. Instead, at the base of the tower, there is a frightful image of a head, " -- huge, inhuman, and monstrous, -- leering in bestial degradation, too foul to be either pictured or described." "This spirit of idiotic mockery" is repeated in many figures throughout the ruinous city; in the head at Santa Maria Formosa, however, "the teeth are represented as decayed" (XI, 144-145, 162). The decayed teeth are the apotheosis of insatiable and bestial hunger, as the spirit of idiotic mockery descends from the Father of Lies. Venice has been delivered over to the Adversary. The original church of St. Mary had been founded where a prelate had seen a vision of the Virgin descending from a silver cloud. The silver cloud plays, in our memory, upon the black smoke rising from the belfry in "The Vestibule," and we realize all at once that the ruin is complete.
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Landow, George P. The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.
_____. Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows; Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature, Art, and Thought. Boston and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.
Rosenberg, John. The Darkening Glass. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961.
Ruskin, John. Works ed. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. 39 vols. London: George Allen, 1903-1912.
Last modified December 2000