St. Marks, Venice

George P. Landow, Shaw Professor of English and Digital Culture, National University of Singapore

Click on images outlined in blue for additional information and for larger pictures, which take longer to download. Photographs by George P. Landow, © October 2000. They may be used for any scholarly or educational purpose without permission, as long as a credit appears.

According to Paul L. Sawyer, Ruskin's "famous paragraph describing the first view of St. Mark's is a catalog of precious substances: the church is 'a treasure-heap, it seems' of gold, opal, mother-of-pearl, alabaster like amber and ivory, jasper, porphyry, deep-green serpentine, marble of every color, coral, amethyst. But it is an animate treasure heap, crowded and leaping with life, bearing in its ornament all the innumerable forms of the created world:

sculpture fantastic and involved, of palm leaves and lilies, and grapes and pomegranates, and birds clinging and fluttering among the branches, all twined together into an endless network of buds and plumes; and, in the midst of it, the solemn form of angels..., their figures indistinct among the gleaming of the golden ground through the leaves beside them, interrupted and dim, like the morning light as it faded back among the branches of Eden, when first its gates were angel-guarded long ago. [Works 10:82-83]

More of Ruskin's Venice

• The Palazzo Ducale, Venice
• The Scuola de San Rocco
• On the Grand Canal
• Leaving the Grand Canal
• On the way to Venice from the mainland
• Venice: Details and Corners

Last modified October 2000