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.
indicates a link to material not in the original print version. Venice throws a challenge to the discriminator, turns away from the seeker for information, scorns the separator of one thing from another. No Venetian architect stands out like the ones of Florence or Rome; the buildings are not Lombardo's or Longhena's, they are Venetian.
--Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces
In Praeterita Ruskin recalled in wistful terms the first summer of his love for Adèle: "The fair heroine, Blanca, was to be endowed with the perfections of Desdemona and the brightness of Juliet, -- and Venice and Love were to be described, as never had been thought of before" (XXXV, 182). Instead, he created a world divided against itself, its fair appearances undermined by hidden watchings and the scheming of a villainous "worm." Then, by September of the same year, he wrote an unpublished defence of Turner's Juliet and Her Nurse, which was also a celebration of Turnerian romance, and in the visit of 1841 Venice became the "Paradise of Cities" -- a deathless monument to his lost love. In 1845 he found her under heavy "restoration," with a railroad bridge plunging across the bay, but he discovered also the undimmed power of Tintoretto. In 1849, when he arrived again with his wife to begin a magnum opus on Venetian history, he found her newly conquered by the Austrians -- the Venice, once again, of Marcolini. For the rest of his life this city was the magnet for his most powerful ambivalences, the symbol of the terrible contradictions of human desire.
The Ruskins may have been the first English visitors to enter the city after the Austrian siege, the most prolonged of the Revolutions of 1848. The rulers that Ruskin, with some reservations, preferred to the native republicans had shelled the city and even planned to launch [90/91] balloons that would explode inside (the inventor, an officer named Paulizza, became Effie's most ardent admirer); now cannon stood beneath the southwest corner of the Ducal Palace, and though crowds gathered daily to hear the military band in St. Mark's Square, it was not unusual for officers to be stabbed in the streets at night. In a letter of January 8, 1850, to the Reverend W. L. Brown, recently published by Jeanne Clegg, Ruskin contrasts the orderliness of Brown's country parish, where things are more or less "all right," with a catalog of Venetian horrors. These include tradesmen selling toys and poultry and holy pictures in St. Mark's; an unemployed workman who murdered the Governor who had fired him, was himself wounded, and then "held up or tied up for form's sake, and properly shot"; a palace used as a coal warehouse; a church installed with a steam engine; and all this the work, he writes, of
a people -- ignorant -- incapable of conceiving such a thing as Truth or Honest -- Blasphemous -- Murderous -- Sensual -- Cowardly -- A people governed by another; which they hate, merely because they are governed by them -- Governed severely because they can be no otherwise governed-and the People that govern them; temperate -- thoughtful -- welltrained [sic] -- well taught -- yet holding their national existence by a mere steel spring which one jar may break; -- inflicting oppression automatically, as a nation, while individually they are kind and good. 1
Repelled and confused by political realities he had neither the flexibility nor the sophistication to grasp, he fell to sketching the monuments and poring through old records in the archives, preparing a definitive work that would contain in stark chiaroscuro both his Venices, the nightmare world of defilement and treachery and the vision of radiant purity.
The polemical aim of The Stones of Venice is to show that a nation's art is always the expression of its moral temper, an aim that further supports the argument begun in his last book for a Gothic revival along Protestant rather than Puseyite lines. His proof rests on the hugest and most exhausting scholarly project he ever attempted. Two seasons of researching and recording, of checking dates and measuring positions of columns and tracing the half-effaced details of old churches, produced three massive volumes (the first a treatise on the elements of architecture), along with thirty-nine appendixes and another series, published concurrently, called Examples of the Architecture of Venice. Like its subject, the book is cacophonous, jumbling styles and alms: the voice grows patient like a teacher's, rhapsodic like a poet's, and solemn like a
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preacher's in the course of an exposition that is at once a textbook, a guidebook, a history, an Evangelical tract -- and ultimately the fulfillment of his youthful dream of writing a romance, although its subject is no longer Bianca but the city herself. Again like the city, the book rises from a confluence of sources and influences. The historical argument draws upon Lord Lindsay's history of religious art (which first made the distinction between an uncorrupted medieval Christianity and a corrupted Renaissance Catholicism) and from Alexis Rio's De la poésie chrétienne. His historical approach draws upon Carlyle's Past and Present and also probably upon the visual oppositions of Pugin's Contrasts. His form, as Elizabeth Helsinger has observed, draws upon the body of contemporary traveler's guides in which "history is approached through travel, and travel experienced as history."
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(Such guides include Murray's Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy, Saussure's Voyages dans les Alpes, and, I would add, Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes, which proceeds from geology to architecture to the depredations of modern tourism and railroad building.) Preceding all these sources, of course, is the boy's reading in Childe Harold and Rogers's Italy, with their romantic dream of the fairy city vanished upon the wave.
The Stones of Venice is perhaps the most remarkable of all Ruskin's attempts to anchor his fantasies in tactile details. The evidences are minute and exhaustive, the argument fantastic, the narrative mode characteristically complex. The first volume, opening and closing with famous word paintings of the city in decay, is largely devoted to a survey of the principles of architecture, using the fiction of a narrator and reader who construct a building from the ground up. The title of the second volume, which begins the historical narrative, is deliberately ambiguous, as Richard Stein has observed, since The Sea-Stories refers both to the "burning legends" and to the lower floors of the buildings. This ambiguity spreads to the first and last titles -- The Foundations and The Fall -- so that the three titles create the metaphor of the state as a building, evoking at once the sweep of history and the collapse of a structure (Stein, 75). Stein also argues that the three volumes, in addition to treating different subjects, use three dominant styles -- the first technical, the second lyrical, the third sermonic -- which correspond to three modes of history: functional, aesthetic, and moral (p. 75). As tour guide Ruskin takes us from site to site, first by gondola, then on foot, with historical commentary proceeding on two [92/93] levels -- the political level, in which the actors are doges, senators, bishops, and so forth, and the architectural level, in which one style succeeds another with features of ornament and design carefully noted and compared. But what distinguishes the narrative from that in other traveler's guides is the famous set pieces by which Ruskin animates the buildings through an act of imaginative seeing, the emotional equivalent of historical memory. The result is a continuous movement through four-dimensional space rather than a switching back and forth between past and present, with the result that each site contains within itself the flow of history, while the flow of history, arrested at each site, manifests itself in spots of time. Buildings embody spiritual states that in turn occupy a less displaced level of narrative, the level of romance, which yields to another level of metaphorical condensation in which the city itself, usually personified as a woman, rises like Venus from the sea, becomes queen of the waves, then partly from her own weakness and partly from the temptation of a southern invader, changes into a harlot and expires. This de casibus plot Ruskin closely associates with the original of all such plots, the Fall of Man. As John Rosenberg noted, "Medieval Europe became a kind of second Eden, a Christianized Golden Age, a pastoral and holy paradise.... One might suppose that men had not fallen from grace until the Renaissance, and that nature had remained uncorrupted until the Industrial Revolution"(Rosenberg, 54).
The historical claims collapse the moment one starts taking them seriously. Ruskin dates the beginning of the Fall, for example, from 1418 or else from 1423, the date of the first additions to the Gothic Ducal Palace -- he even claims to locate the first hammer blow; yet in his view the climax of Venetian art is the oil painting of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the period also of the Roman and Grotesque Renaissance. The generalized type of a French Gothic cathedral (which Ruskin describes as the invention of rude tribesmen rather than the sophisticated circle of Abbot Suger) never really descended to Italy and has little application to Ruskin's prize example, the Ducal Palace, with its Byzantine ornament and long rows of orderly columns. The ruin motif is perhaps the greatest extravagance: with characteristic literalness, he compares Venice's commercial decline with the devastation of Tyre, yet the rocks of this ruin are not so bleached that Ruskin cannot examine them in the company of obliging sextons and officials and spend two winters in comfortable lodgings. But behind the literal Venice and the accumulation of dubious historical connections stands Ruskin's true subject, the locus of a plot that is nothing less than the legend of the European soul. The burden of this plot has been well described by Gerald Bruns as a version of historical dissociation, the [93/94] conflict between Protestantism and rationalism. Like any historical myth, its interest lies in its explanatory power for the present.
"Since first the dominion of men was asserted over the ocean," Ruskin begins, "three thrones, of mark beyond all others, have been set upon its sands: the thrones of Tyre, Venice, and England. Of the First of these great powers only the memory remains; of the Second, the ruin; the Third, which inherits their greatness, if it forget their example, may be led through prouder eminence to less pitied destruction" (IX, 17). Like Carlyle in his historical works, Ruskin reads the past as a preacher would read the Bible, locating in paradigmatic manifestations of the historical process evidences of a "lasting witness" against the present. But Ruskin hews more strictly than Carlyle to the structure of Old Testament prophecy, in which the destruction visited upon an infidel nation foreshadows Israel's possible fate as well. The relationship of Tyre, Venice, and England is, in other words, a typological relationship.
Typology is a method of biblical interpretation that treats persons and events in the Old Testament as prefigurements of events in the life of Christ, the antitypes through which the Old Testament types are "completed" or "fulfilled." George P. Landow has decisively established the importance of Evangelical typology for Ruskin's art criticism -- for his pioneering interpretations of Renaissance art, for his general theory of allegory, and for his reading of the Book of Nature, written, like the Bible, in the language of types and shadows. And as Landow has also shown, Ruskin's method derives directly from his religious education at Herne Hill, both from books and from the sermons of the great Evangelical preacher Henry Melvill, which the family heard on Sundays and which the boy summarized each week in his journal (Aesthetic Theories, 329-356). It also turns out that in 1842 John James Ruskin bought an edition of Coleridge that may have contained Coleridge's chief contribution to the typological tradition, The Statesman's Manual. We do not know whether Ruskin read this work, although he did read The Friend, passages from which Coleridge incorporated in the Manual. 6 In any [94/95] case, Coleridge's argument is essential to our purposes, not only for its many verbal anticipations of Ruskin's work but also for its essential argument, the clearest exposition in romantic literature of Ruskin's method in The Stones of Venice.
The chief aim of Coleridge's "lay sermon" is to demonstrate the Bible's supreme practical relevance by means of his well-known distinction between understanding and Reason. He claims that contemporary social science (including Enlightenment philosophers and British utilitarians) necessarily falls to construct principles because it is a science of the mere understanding; limited to the gathering of data, empiricist history can only presuppose mechanistic "causes" or "forces," or more trivially, can merely relate anecdotes about great men. The fact that people consider the Bible irrelevant to contemporary politics-that they see no essential resemblance, for example, between the chaos following the French Revolution and the rebellion of Jeroboam-is a symptom of the very problem that a faithful reading of the Bible will cure; for the Bible teaches us how events may differ in form yet manifest recurrent principles. In Coleridge's reading, the Scriptures provide us with the grounds of all historical understanding, since history is the continuous unfolding of Providence; it is also a paradigm of genuinely philosophical history, since its events, as types, have both a concrete and a general significance; they are the "living educts of the Imagination," the faculty mediating between the concrete and the transcendent, the faculty that perceives things as symbols. Biblical history presents
the stream of time continuous as Life and a symbol of Eternity, inasmuch as the Past and the Future are virtually contained in the present.... In the Scriptures therefore both Facts and Persons must of necessity have a two- [95/96] fold significance, a past and a future, a temporary and a perpetual, a particular and a universal application. They must be at once Portraits and Ideals(Coleridge, VI, 29-30).
Biblical history, in short, is a vision of human freedom through time: "In the Bible every agent appears and acts as a self-substituting individual: each has a life of its own, and yet all are one life. The elements of necessity and free-will are reconciled in the highest power of an omnipresent Providence, that predestinates the whole in the moral freedom of the integral parts.... The root is never detached from the ground"(Ibid., 31-32). In this way Coleridge generalizes biblical typology to the study of all human history, since any event truly understood embodies a recurrent principle in concrete form and so stands at once as a repetition and as a prophecy. This argument provides the context of Coleridge's famous definition of the symbol: "a translucence of the Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial or of the Universal in the General" and of "the Eternal through and in the Temporal"(Ibid.,30). Although usually taken as aesthetic doctrine, the definition also provides the key to understanding the pattern of historical events and, finally, the structure of all moral actions inspired by what Coleridge calls "enthusiasm," For the heart of his concern in the Manual is moral freedom, the human participation In a historical medium whose final purpose transcends human will.
It will be clear at once that The Stones of Venice fulfills Coleridge's project in at least two ways, as a sermon and as an act of interpretation. Coleridge is himself a bad preacher: when, for example, he proposes to show specifically how the Bible can teach practical politics, he first postpones his aim, then returns to it later by quoting a denunciation from Isaiah in order to condemn the French Revolution, then retreats again into a description of Reason. But his task is to show how to read the Bible not with understanding only but with the fullness of intuitive assent that he calls Faith, the ground of the possibility of all action and knowledge. Ruskin, on the other hand, induces assent by means of a sermonic style that combines moral fervor with an enraptured evocation of historical events and historical artifacts. And by interpreting events as biblical types, he performs a symbolic abstraction by which history in its recurrent patterns becomes grimly significant for the present.
In this regard he transcends the idea of Coleridgean history on two counts. In the first place, Coleridge conceives of history in terms of [96/97] principles but not really in terms of process or change. A comparison of the Manual with the histories of Carlyle and Ruskin validates Bruns's distinction between synchronic and diachronic conceptions, since the Victorians interpret typological recurrence as a historical evolution that compels new forms. By grounding the Venetian Gothic, for example, in the circumstances of a particular cultural occasion, Ruskin can also urge a revival of the Gothic because of cultural circumstances in England-the power of enlightened patrons and consumers to create social relations analogous to those of the Gothic builder and his workmen. 10 In the second place, by transferring most of his attention to buildings as events, he enriches the Coleridgean idea of a symbol: his churches, we might say, are portraits and ideals because they are aesthetic representations as well. In The Seven Lamps of Architecture, he enumerated seven modes of architectural meaning as though they were virtues, which together describe, as a living spirit, or ethos, the complete moral possibilities of a Christian society. In The Stones of Venice Ruskin describes particular variations of architectural expression in time (as he had in The Poetry of Architecture), constructing a historical narrative in which the chief "characters" are spirits manifested as styles, styles manifested in particular exemplary monuments. Here rests the originality of this book. Because Ruskin believes art to be the externalization of the artisan's soul, he can read buildings with a psychological complexity that is cogent both as art criticism and as dramatic portraiture. 11
Ruskin's succession of spirits or styles presents the drama of history in terms at once idealist and typological. But we can also shift perspective and see The Stones of Venice as an action centering on a single character, the city itself. In this view, the plot takes the form of a massive Victorian melodrama in which history is predominantly elegiac.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Collected Works, ed. Kathleen Coburn. 16 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.
Frye, Northrop. A Study of English Romanticism. New York: Random House, 1968.
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.
Ricoeur, Paul. The Symboplism of Evil. Trans. Emerson Buchanan. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967.
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.
Ruskin, John. The Ruskin's Family Letter. Ed. Van Akin Burd, 2 vols. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973.
Ruskin, John. The Diaries of John Ruskin ed. Joanne Evans and John Howard Whitehouse, 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956.
Young, G.M. Victorian England, Portrait of an Age. London: Oxford University Press. 1936; reprint, 1960.
Last modified December 2000