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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Stones of Venice," John Ruskin offers a profound exploration of architecture, art, and the moral underpinnings of society. This multi-volume work deftly combines vivid descriptions, detailed analyses, and historical insights, delving deep into the construction and aesthetics of Venetian architecture as a reflection of cultural values. Ruskin employs an evocative literary style rich in metaphor and symbolism, illuminating how the intricate details of buildings inspire both moral contemplation and societal critique. Its context emerges from the Victorian era's fascination with art and history, against the backdrop of burgeoning industrialization that threatened traditional craftsmanship. John Ruskin, a pivotal figure in the Victorian art movement, was an ardent advocate for craftsmanship and the beauty of nature, deeply influenced by his environmental convictions and a reverence for medieval artistry. His extensive travels in Europe, particularly his admiration for Venice, fueled his belief that architecture is a moral and philosophical reflection of its time. Ruskin's commitment to social reform and his concern for the decline of artisan craftsmanship are evident throughout this work, as he seeks to reconnect art with ethical living. Readers seeking a rich, interdisciplinary examination of architecture and its role in society will find "The Stones of Venice" an indispensable tome. Ruskin's eloquence and passionate advocacy for aesthetic and moral values resonate with contemporary issues in art and culture, making this seminal work a critical read for anyone interested in the intersections of art history, philosophy, and social criticism. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Stones of Venice (Vol. 1-3)
Table of Contents
Introduction
In The Stones of Venice, the city’s carved cornices and worn pavements become a ledger in which a civilization’s rise, ideals, and decline are written in stone.
John Ruskin’s three-volume The Stones of Venice, published between 1851 and 1853, is at once an architectural history, a travel study, and a moral inquiry. A leading Victorian critic and essayist, Ruskin surveys the buildings of Venice from their Byzantine beginnings through Gothic splendor to Renaissance transformations. He pairs close, almost tactile description with historical narrative to argue that architecture expresses the spirit and ethics of the society that builds it. His aim is not merely to catalog monuments, but to teach readers how to see: to discern workmanship, to read surfaces, and to understand how beauty, labor, and belief converge in stone.
The book emerges from the heart of the nineteenth century, when industrialization, mass production, and urban growth were remaking Europe. Ruskin writes against the flattening effects of mechanical uniformity, holding up the crafts of Venice as evidence that freedom and dignity can be legible in ornament and structure. His broader Victorian concerns—education of taste, responsibility toward workers, and the moral obligations of art—infuse the study. Yet he is never a mere nostalgic; he recognizes change while asking how a modern society might sustain excellence without sacrificing humanity. The city of Venice becomes both case study and parable for that urgent question.
Ruskin grounds his argument in direct observation. He measured arches, sketched capitals, and studied weathered surfaces with the patience of a naturalist. The volumes are informed by his drawings and careful notes, and by a method that blends taxonomy with narrative. He isolates profiles, tracery, and moldings to show how small decisions accumulate into a style, and how style reveals intention. But he also listens to atmosphere: light on water, stone under salt air, craft under civic law. In this double attention—microscopic detail and sweeping interpretation—lies one of the work’s distinctive achievements and an enduring model for art-historical writing.
Its status as a classic rests on its reach across disciplines and generations. The Stones of Venice reshaped architectural criticism by linking aesthetic judgments to social meaning, and it galvanized debates about restoration, preservation, and the ethics of building. It helped catalyze the Arts and Crafts movement, encouraging designers and reformers such as William Morris to reclaim handcraft as a foundation of cultural health. The book’s insistence that buildings embody communal values influenced not only architects but planners, historians, and curators. It remains a touchstone because it pairs passionate advocacy with patient analysis, demonstrating how critical vision can refine public taste.
Ruskin’s voice also entered literature, travel writing, and cultural commentary. His Venetian pages trained readers to move slowly, to linger over a capital or a frieze until meaning emerges. Writers and critics after him, including figures such as Marcel Proust and Henry James, engaged with his ideas about memory, perception, and the city as a text. The Stones of Venice thereby helped establish Venice as a key setting in the modern imagination: a place where art, history, and the self intersect. Its cadenced prose and ethical urgency furnished a template for reflective travel literature and for essays that braid observation with moral insight.
At the core of the work is a comparative history of style. Ruskin traces the transition from Byzantine forms, with their luminous mosaics and arcs of inheritance from the East, to the Gothic, with its structural candor and exuberant carving, and then to the Renaissance, with its classicizing order. He interprets these shifts as the outward signs of changing civic energies and priorities. Principles recur: truth to materials, structural integrity, the joy of individual craft within communal purpose. The analysis is not a neutral chronicle; it is a plea to recognize how a society’s freedoms and restraints are chiselled into its architectural language.
Across the three volumes, the argument unfolds from physical foundations to civic narratives. Ruskin begins with the geology and building stones that make Venice possible, then turns to churches and palaces as embodiments of belief and governance, and finally addresses the historical arc of the republic’s cultural life. He moves from cornice profiles to state rituals, from the mason’s chisel to the senate chamber, showing how details participate in public meaning. The structure enables readers to travel from matter to meaning and back again, cultivating a habit of seeing that alternates between inspection and overview, between the part and the whole.
As prose, The Stones of Venice is notable for its balance of precision and fervor. Ruskin’s sentences render minute textures while sustaining a moral horizon, an uncommon blend that has long drawn readers outside architecture. He writes with painterly exactness about light and color, and with philosopher’s care about judgment and value. Yet he never allows style to float free of evidence; description is tethered to measurements, comparisons, and patiently built distinctions. This union of rhetoric and research gave the book its longevity: it is a work to consult for facts and to revisit for the cadence of its thought.
No classic endures without debate, and Ruskin’s claims have invited contestation. Later historians have revised aspects of his periodization and questioned some causal links between style and social health. His moral interpretations can seem stringent, and his judgments occasionally overgeneralize. Yet the durability of the book lies in its method rather than any single conclusion: attend to making, attend to context, attend to the life of workers and the conditions of form. Even when one disagrees, the questions he poses remain generative, and his insistence on responsibility in interpretation continues to shape scholarly and public discourse.
For contemporary readers, the book speaks to pressing concerns: the stewardship of heritage in an era of environmental and touristic pressures, the search for meaning in work and craft, and the need for cities that honor memory while adapting to change. Ruskin’s care for materials encourages sustainable thinking; his attention to human labor resists the anonymity of mass production; his alertness to place invites respectful travel and restoration. The Stones of Venice thus functions not only as a nineteenth-century monument, but as a guide for how to look, how to value, and how to act toward the built world we inherit.
To enter these volumes is to encounter a city read as a moral and aesthetic text, and to learn a discipline of seeing that links beauty with responsibility. The main ideas—art as social record, craft as a form of liberty, form as ethical choice—surround the reader with a seriousness that never stifles delight. That combination explains the work’s lasting appeal: it is rigorous without dryness, impassioned without dogma. As long as we ask what kind of society our buildings reveal and enable, The Stones of Venice will remain a living companion and a challenge to our judgment.
Synopsis (Selection)
John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice (Vol. 1–3) surveys the architecture of Venice as a record of the city’s social and spiritual history. Drawing on close observation, measured drawings, and historical sources, he traces the development of Venetian building from its Byzantine origins through its Gothic culmination to its Renaissance transformation. Across the three volumes, he analyzes materials, structural forms, and ornament, linking visible changes in style with shifts in civic character and labor conditions. The work combines typological classification with detailed case studies of churches and palaces, aiming to establish principles for evaluating architecture and to document monuments at risk of alteration.
Volume I establishes the physical and historical foundations of Venetian architecture. Ruskin describes the lagoon’s geography, the city’s timber piles and stone platforms, and the reliance on Istrian limestone, Verona marble, and other colored stones. He outlines Venice’s early growth through commerce and contact with the East, introducing Byzantine influence on construction and decoration. He presents criteria for architectural judgment, emphasizing truth to materials, legible structure, and the role of color. The volume situates buildings within the city’s environmental constraints and political rise, preparing the reader for a chronological and stylistic account grounded in material facts and observed fabric.
The early Venetian-Byzantine phase is presented through domed churches, mosaic ornament, and encrusted marble facings. Ruskin catalogues the use of spolia, round arches, and richly patterned surfaces, noting the importation and adaptation of Eastern forms. He treats St Mark’s Basilica as a key exemplar, examining its plan, porches, columns, and inlaid veneers, and the programmatic effect of its gilded interiors. The analysis highlights continuity of construction methods and decorative practices, while marking the gradual shift toward local interpretation. This section defines the baseline from which later Venetian innovations depart, especially in how structure, surface, and symbolism are integrated.
Volume II moves to the rise of Venetian Gothic, describing the adoption of the pointed arch, the deepening of tracery, and the expansion of sculptural ornament. Ruskin formulates the characteristics of Gothic—rudeness, changefulness, naturalism, grotesqueness, rigidity, and redundancy—and links them to workshop practice. He argues that the freedom and responsibility of individual carvers produce variety and vitality in detail. Classification of window groups, archivolts, and cornices shows a progression from simple arcades to complex cusped and ogee forms. The volume presents Gothic as both a technical and an ethical phenomenon, expressed through structure, ornament, and the conditions of labor.
Domestic architecture on the Grand Canal is examined through exemplary palaces, including the Ca’ d’Oro and the Ca’ Foscari. Ruskin analyzes façade compositions of arcaded lower stories, traceried central tiers, and crowning cornices, emphasizing the interplay of light, shadow, and color. He documents column proportions, capital types, quatrefoil patterns, and balcony profiles, organizing them into developmental sequences. Attention is given to materials—pale Istrian stone contrasted with colored marbles—and to carved flora, fauna, and figure subjects that animate thresholds and windows. This survey situates individual buildings within a broader typology, illustrating how domestic structures evolved alongside civic institutions.
Religious and civic monuments receive detailed treatment, notably St Mark’s and the Ducal Palace. Ruskin describes the basilica’s sculptured portals, archivolts, and mosaic fields, relating narrative cycles to architectural members. His account of the Ducal Palace examines its structural logic—double arcades, wall planes, and fenestration—and the chronological layers visible on its façades. A notable section catalogues the capitals of the lower arcade, identifying allegorical, botanical, and occupational themes and their workmanship. Monastic complexes, smaller churches, and campanili are also considered, reinforcing how iconography, structure, and ornament cohere in Venetian public architecture at its Gothic height.
Volume III addresses the transition to Renaissance forms and the city’s architectural decline, as Ruskin interprets it. He contrasts Gothic polychromy and carved variety with the Renaissance emphasis on classical orders, planar surfaces, and symmetrical composition. Examples include civic works by Sansovino—the Library of St Mark and the Mint—and church architecture associated with Palladio, such as San Giorgio Maggiore and Il Redentore. The discussion notes changes in workshop organization, finish, and decorative programs, and records alterations to earlier buildings, including the Ducal Palace. The volume situates stylistic transformation within broader cultural shifts affecting patronage, craftsmanship, and the urban image.
Across the trilogy, Ruskin advances general conclusions about architecture’s relation to society. He maintains that buildings reflect collective beliefs and labor conditions, and that authentic ornament arises from nature study, honest construction, and the craftsman’s discretion. He opposes deceptive finishes and restorations that erase historical evidence, urging conservation of original fabric and methods. His analysis of tracery, capitals, and moldings becomes a framework for recognizing stages of growth and decline. By connecting workshop practice to visible form, he proposes criteria by which to judge architectural integrity, linking material choices, structural expression, and decorative intent with civic character.
The Stones of Venice concludes as a comprehensive record and argument, using Venice’s buildings to illustrate the rise, culmination, and transformation of a culture. It offers a sequence from Byzantine foundations through Gothic maturity to Renaissance change, grounded in firsthand study of stones, joints, and carvings. The work’s central message is that architecture embodies the moral and practical life of its makers and patrons, and that preservation and truthful craft sustain that legacy. By assembling typologies, examples, and principles, Ruskin provides readers with tools to recognize value, understand historical development, and consider implications for contemporary building and conservation.
Historical Context
John Ruskin’s three-volume The Stones of Venice examines the architecture of Venice as a historical document embedded in the city’s lagoon environment and political destiny. The work’s implicit setting ranges from the city’s early medieval emergence to its Renaissance and Baroque transformations, all read through buildings, stones, and craft techniques. Venetian architecture relied on Istrian limestone, Verona marble, and brick adapted to tidal foundations, producing distinctive arcades, tracery, and polychromy. Ruskin situates specific edifices such as the Basilica of San Marco, the Ducal Palace, and domestic Gothic palaces within a civic narrative, treating façades, capitals, and moldings as evidence for the moral temper of successive ages.
Composed after extended fieldwork in the city, the books were written amid 19th‑century political and industrial change. Ruskin visited Venice repeatedly (notably 1845 and 1849–1852), publishing Volume I in 1851 and Volumes II–III in 1853. Venice then belonged to the Austrian-controlled Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia (since 1815), and the 1848–1849 siege still haunted the urban fabric. The new railway causeway from Mestre, opened in 1846, signaled modern pressures on the lagoon. From Britain, Ruskin brought anxieties over factory labor and the Great Exhibition of 1851, which framed his comparative reading of Venetian craft. Thus time and place fuse: a medieval republic examined through the lens of modern upheaval.
Venice’s origins lie in settlements on mudflats formed by refugees escaping Gothic and Lombard incursions in the 5th–7th centuries. By the 9th century it had a ducal government and a maritime orientation toward Byzantium. A landmark event was the translation of the relics of St Mark to Venice in 828, carried by merchants Buono da Malamocco and Rustico da Torcello, which anchored the city’s civic religion and patronage. The basilica that houses them took its present form between 1063 and 1094. Ruskin treats these moments as the seedbed of a Byzantine-Venetian synthesis, visible in domes, mosaics, and a language of ornament that grounds later developments.
Venice’s privileges within the Byzantine sphere were formalized by the chrysobull of 1082 granted by Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, easing tariffs and securing trading rights in Constantinople and the Aegean. This accelerated the import of silks, spices, and artistic techniques, alongside spolia incorporated into San Marco’s fabric. Greek mosaicists and local workshops fused to produce a distinctive iconographic program. The urban marketplace, the Rialto, expanded with pontoon bridges and, later, permanent crossings. In Ruskin’s account, these facts matter because the city’s stone skin records them: porphyry panels, carved capitals, and tessellated pavements testify to a mercantile piety and diplomacy that shaped Venice’s earliest architectural grammar.
The Fourth Crusade (1202–1204) decisively redirected Venetian power. Under Doge Enrico Dandolo, Venetian fleets transported crusaders, first to capture Zara in November 1202, then to Constantinople, culminating in the sack of April 1204. The episode yielded immense spoils, including the bronze quadriga now on San Marco, and commercial dominance in former Byzantine ports. It also infused Venice with Eastern marbles and reliefs. Ruskin mines these facts to argue that Venice’s medieval magnificence is literally built from conquest and trade, yet ennobled when disciplined by civic faith. He reads the heterogeneous surfaces of San Marco and the Ducal Palace as a ledger of 1204’s consequences.
The Stato da Mar, Venice’s maritime empire, grew across the 13th–16th centuries: Crete (from 1205), Negroponte, the Dalmatian coast, and later Cyprus (annexed 1489) formed a chain of bases protecting spice routes. The Arsenal, documented from 1104 and vastly expanded in the 14th century, industrialized shipbuilding with ropewalks, foundries, and standardized parts. A famous 1574 demonstration for France’s Henry III showcased a galley’s rapid outfitting. Ruskin, fascinated by labor, invokes the Arsenal to contrast disciplined craft with soulless mechanization. He regards vernacular details in quays, warehouses like the Fondaco dei Tedeschi (rebuilt 1505–1508), and canal-front palaces as social evidence of an economy ordered to trade and skilled work.
The Serrata del Maggior Consiglio of 1297, steered by Doge Pietro Gradenigo, closed the Great Council to a hereditary patriciate, consolidating oligarchic rule. After the failed conspiracy of Bajamonte Tiepolo in 1310, the Council of Ten became a permanent organ of state security. These constitutional shifts stabilized governance while narrowing political participation. Ruskin links this social contraction to an aesthetic and moral trajectory: early communal vigor, expressed in the freedom and diversity of Gothic carving, hardens into courtly display and regulated formality. The Ducal Palace’s evolving program, civic rituals, and the management of the Scuole Grandi become, in his reading, architectural mirrors of patrician ascendancy.
The Black Death of 1348 devastated Venice, killing perhaps half the population and halting commerce. Recovery fostered philanthropy and confraternity, strengthening the Scuole Grandi such as San Marco and later San Rocco. In architecture, the later 14th and early 15th centuries saw a flowering of Venetian Gothic: traceried windows, ogee arches, and marble intarsia in palaces like the Ca d’Oro, begun in 1421 for Marin Contarini by Giovanni and Bartolomeo Bon. Ruskin celebrates this moment as the apex of ethical craftsmanship, where individual carvers on capitals and cornices left idiosyncratic marks under merciful workmanship. He treats the plague’s aftermath as a crucible for compassionate civic art.
The Ducal Palace’s expansion from the 1340s answered political and judicial needs of the Great Council. Builders associated with its Gothic shell include the sculptor-architect Filippo Calendario, later executed in 1355 for complicity in Doge Marin Faliero’s conspiracy. The palace’s lower arcade carries richly narrative capitals, which Ruskin catalogued in sequence, reading their foliage, trades, and moral allegories as a civic encyclopedia. Subsequent fires in 1483 and 1577 damaged sections; rebuilding after 1577 preserved the Gothic envelope while refitting interiors, including Tintoretto’s Paradise in the Great Council Chamber. For Ruskin, the palace condenses Venice’s rise, internal crises, and self-fashioning into a single, decipherable stone text.
A Renaissance idiom entered Venice in the late 15th century. Mauro Codussi introduced crisp classical orders at San Michele in Isola (begun 1469) and San Zaccaria’s façade. After the 1483 fire, Antonio Rizzo reworked the Ducal Palace’s inner courtyards and the Scala dei Giganti. Jacopo Sansovino, appointed proto in 1529, stabilized San Marco’s campanile and erected the Libreria Marciana (from 1537) and the Zecca (1536), reshaping the Piazzetta in travertine-crowned classicism. Andrea Palladio’s San Giorgio Maggiore (foundation 1566) and Il Redentore (1577–1592) brought measured monumentality. Ruskin frames this shift as moral danger: antique display and technical perfection, he argues, mask a slow estrangement of patron from craftsman.
The League of Cambrai (1508–1516) united Pope Julius II, Louis XII of France, Emperor Maximilian I, and Ferdinand of Aragon to crush Venetian terraferma power. At Agnadello on 14 May 1509, Venice suffered a disastrous defeat; commander Bartolomeo d’Alviano was captured. Yet the republic recovered by diplomacy and arms, recapturing Padua in July 1509 and, under future doge Andrea Gritti, surviving until shifting alliances isolated France. By 1516 Venice retained much territory. Ruskin sees in the civic architecture of the following decades a blend of resilience and bravado: new façades and public works project order and magnificence precisely when political vulnerability demanded symbolic reassurance.
Prolonged conflict with the Ottoman Empire reshaped Venice. The loss of Negroponte in 1470 signaled mounting pressure; Cyprus, held since 1489 through Catherine Cornaro, fell in 1570–1573 after the heroic but doomed defense of Famagusta and the execution of Marcantonio Bragadin. The Holy League’s victory at Lepanto on 7 October 1571, led by Don John of Austria with Venetian admiral Sebastiano Venier, was decisive at sea but did not reverse territorial loss. The plague of 1575–1577 then killed a third of Venetians. The Senate vowed Il Redentore, designed by Palladio, as an act of thanksgiving. Ruskin reads these events in sober façades and votive churches, signs of piety amid contraction.
Global trade realigned after Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498, diverting spices around the Cape and eroding Venetian margins. The plague of 1630 killed roughly 46,000 in Venice, prompting the Senate’s vow for Santa Maria della Salute. Baldassare Longhena began the octagonal church in 1631; it was completed in 1687, crowning the Grand Canal with Baroque exuberance. Murano’s glass industry, concentrated there since 1291 to mitigate fire risk, adapted by producing luxury wares for European courts. Ruskin, skeptical of Baroque rhetoric and luxury consumption, treats Salute and late palatial façades as symptoms of display over substance, contrasting them with the earlier Gothic ethos of truthful structure and handiwork.
The republic collapsed in 1797 under Napoleon. On 12 May, the last doge, Ludovico Manin, abdicated; the Great Council dissolved. The Treaty of Campo Formio (17 October 1797) transferred Venice to Austria; the French carried off treasures, including San Marco’s horses, later set on the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel and restored in 1815. From 1805 to 1814 Venice belonged to Napoleon’s Kingdom of Italy, then the Austrian Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia (1815). Monasteries were suppressed, properties secularized, and many complexes altered or demolished. Ruskin treats the voids, broken cloisters, and displaced sculpture as wounds that make the city’s remaining medieval fabric an endangered historical testimony.
The 1848–1849 revolution briefly restored a Republic of San Marco under Daniele Manin and Niccolò Tommaseo, proclaimed on 22 March 1848. Austrian forces besieged the city; Fort Marghera fell on 27 May 1849; cholera and famine ravaged inhabitants. Venice capitulated on 24 August 1849. Austrian engineers had already tied the city to the mainland by railway in 1846, symbolizing new control and economic integration. Mid-century restorations, especially at San Marco and the Ducal Palace, often replaced decayed work. Ruskin, working in Venice between 1849 and 1852, sketched crumbling capitals and condemned what he called destructive renewal, using the city’s suffering and repairs to warn industrial Britain about cultural amnesia.
Ruskin’s book functions as a social and political critique by reading architecture as the product of labor relations. He contrasts the free, varied workmanship of medieval Venetian Gothic with the regimented polish of Renaissance classicism, aligning the former with dignity in manual craft and the latter with elite display and the subordination of workers. He denounces arbitrary restoration policies as bureaucratic violence against collective memory. His analysis of guild practices, the Arsenal’s organization, and the Scuole Grandi frames buildings as records of social justice or injustice, arguing that a city’s moral economy is carved into its stones as plainly as any inscription.
Addressing his Victorian contemporaries, Ruskin leverages Venetian history to critique class division, mechanized production, and the moral hazards of wealth. The Great Exhibition of 1851, with its industrial luxuries, becomes a foil to the honest imperfection he prizes in medieval carving. He invokes episodes like the Serrata and the republic’s late ostentation to warn Britain that oligarchy, spectacle, and the degradation of workers presage civic decline. By insisting on preservation over facile improvement, and on the education of craftsmen and citizens alike, The Stones of Venice exposes the era’s central issues: exploitative labor systems, cultural disposability, and the politicization of public taste.
Author Biography
John Ruskin (1819–1900) was a British writer, art critic, and social thinker whose ideas shaped Victorian culture and continue to influence debates about art, architecture, education, and political economy. Trained as a keen observer of nature and form, he argued that artistic excellence and moral purpose were inseparable. Across essays, lectures, and multi-volume studies, he championed the close study of landscape and medieval architecture, defended contemporary painters, and later advanced a critique of industrial capitalism. His distinctive blend of aesthetic judgment, ethical reflection, and public advocacy made him one of the nineteenth century’s most widely read and contested intellectuals, engaging audiences far beyond specialist art circles.
Ruskin’s education combined rigorous study with extensive European travel, experiences that nourished his lifelong attention to mountains, stones, and skies. He studied at the University of Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry, and developed a disciplined practice of drawing and note-taking from nature. Early influences included Romantic literature and above all the work of J. M. W. Turner, whose atmospheric landscapes Ruskin would famously defend. Encounters with the Alps and Italian cities intensified his interest in geology, building craft, and urban form. This blend of scientific observation and aesthetic sensitivity set the foundation for his major critical works and for his conviction that art embodies moral truths.
Ruskin first achieved prominence with Modern Painters, a multi-volume project begun in the 1840s to vindicate Turner and to promote “truth to nature” as the basis of great art. He insisted that careful, honest perception outranked academic formulae, and he used precise descriptions of clouds, rocks, and vegetation to model a new, exacting criticism. The work expanded into a comprehensive theory of landscape painting, linking technical excellence to ethical character and spiritual insight. Though controversial, Modern Painters established his authority as a critic and attracted a broad readership. Alongside criticism, he tried fiction and children’s literature with The King of the Golden River, showing his range and didactic aims.
In architecture, Ruskin set out principles that rivaled his painterly criticism in influence. The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice argued for the moral and social value of Gothic, praising its expressive structure, craft labor, and freedom within discipline. He opposed shoddy restoration and mechanized ornament, urging respect for historic fabric and the dignity of skilled workmanship. His analysis of Venetian buildings combined meticulous description with broader reflections on society’s health. Publicly supporting the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, he defended their fidelity to nature and bought their work, amplifying their impact. Through these efforts, he shaped Victorian taste and informed preservation debates that extend into current heritage practice.
From the late 1850s, Ruskin increasingly addressed economics, education, and social reform. In lectures later published as The Political Economy of Art (also known as A Joy for Ever), he attacked laissez-faire assumptions and argued that art depends on just social arrangements. Unto This Last refined his critique of prevailing political economy, advocating humane, cooperative principles. Sesame and Lilies explored reading, culture, and the formation of character. He taught drawing to working men and served as Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, promoting careful looking as a civic skill. With the Guild of St George, he experimented with practical reforms, encouraging small-scale craftsmanship, land stewardship, and ethical consumption.
Ruskin remained a prolific lecturer and travel writer into the 1870s and 1880s, publishing Fors Clavigera, Mornings in Florence, and The Bible of Amiens, among other works. His writings on Italian art continued to blend close description with moral argument, while his letters sought direct dialogue with workers and citizens. Periods of ill health and mental strain, especially in his later decades, curtailed public activity, and he spent much of his time at Brantwood in the Lake District. There he wrote Praeterita, a reflective, unfinished autobiography that revisited formative landscapes and ideas. Even as he withdrew from public life, his books and collected drawings sustained his intellectual presence.
Ruskin’s legacy is broad. He influenced the Arts and Crafts movement and figures such as William Morris, shaped conservationist attitudes to buildings and landscapes, and lent moral weight to debates about the purposes of education and work. His social economics inspired reformers well into the twentieth century; readers as different as Mahatma Gandhi and Marcel Proust engaged deeply with his texts, with Proust translating some of them into French. Today, scholars read Ruskin for his interdisciplinary method, environmental attentiveness, and critique of industrial modernity. His major works remain in print, his collections are studied in museums, and his arguments continue to frame discussions of value in art and society.
The Stones of Venice (Vol. 1-3)
Volume 1
THE FOUNDATIONS
PREFACE.
In the course of arranging the following essay, I put many things aside in my thoughts to be said in the Preface, things which I shall now put aside altogether, and pass by; for when a book has been advertised a year and a half, it seems best to present it with as little preface as possible.
Thus much, however, it is necessary for the reader to know, that, when I planned the work, I had materials by me, collected at different times of sojourn in Venice during the last seventeen years, which it seemed to me might be arranged with little difficulty, and which I believe to be of value as illustrating the history of Southern Gothic. Requiring, however, some clearer assurance respecting certain points of chronology, I went to Venice finally in the autumn of 1849, not doubting but that the dates of the principal edifices of the ancient city were either ascertained, or ascertainable without extraordinary research. To my consternation, I found that the Venetian antiquaries were not agreed within a century as to the date of the building of the façades of the Ducal Palace, and that nothing was known of any other civil edifice of the early city, except that at some time or other it had been fitted up for somebody’s reception, and been thereupon fresh painted. Every date in question was determinable only by internal evidence, and it became necessary for me to examine not only every one of the older palaces, stone by stone, but every fragment throughout the city which afforded any clue to the formation of its styles. This I did as well as I could, and I believe there will be found, in the following pages, the only existing account of the details of early Venetian architecture on which dependence can be placed, as far as it goes. I do not care to point out the deficiencies of other works on this subject; the reader will find, if he examines them, either that the buildings to which I shall specially direct his attention have been hitherto undescribed, or else that there are great discrepancies between previous descriptions and mine: for which discrepancies I may be permitted to give this single and sufficient reason, that my account of every building is based on personal examination and measurement of it, and that my taking the pains so to examine what I had to describe, was a subject of grave surprise to my Italian friends. The work of the Marchese Selvatico is, however, to be distinguished with respect; it is clear in arrangement, and full of useful, though vague, information; and I have found cause to adopt, in great measure, its views of the chronological succession of the edifices of Venice. I shall have cause hereafter to quarrel with it on other grounds, but not without expression of gratitude for the assistance it has given me. Fontana’s “Fabbriche di Venezia” is also historically valuable, but does not attempt to give architectural detail. Cicognara, as is now generally known, is so inaccurate as hardly to deserve mention.
Indeed, it is not easy to be accurate in an account of anything, however simple. Zoologists often disagree in their descriptions of the curve of a shell, or the plumage of a bird, though they may lay their specimen on the table, and examine it at their leisure; how much greater becomes the likelihood of error in the description of things which must be in many parts observed from a distance, or under unfavorable circumstances of light and shade; and of which many of the distinctive features have been worn away by time. I believe few people have any idea of the cost of truth in these things; of the expenditure of time necessary to make sure of the simplest facts, and of the strange way in which separate observations will sometimes falsify each other, incapable of reconcilement, owing to some imperceptible inadvertency. I am ashamed of the number of times in which I have had to say, in the following pages, “I am not sure,” and I claim for them no authority, as if they were thoroughly sifted from error, even in what they more confidently state. Only, as far as my time, and strength, and mind served me, I have endeavored down to the smallest matters, to ascertain and speak the truth.
Nor was the subject without many and most discouraging difficulties, peculiar to itself. As far as my inquiries have extended, there is not a building in Venice, raised prior to the sixteenth century, which has not sustained essential change in one or more of its most important features. By far the greater number present examples of three or four different styles, it may be successive, it may be accidentally associated; and, in many instances, the restorations or additions have gradually replaced the entire structure of the ancient fabric, of which nothing but the name remains, together with a kind of identity, exhibited in the anomalous association of the modernized portions: the Will of the old building asserted through them all, stubbornly, though vainly, expressive; superseded by codicils, and falsified by misinterpretation; yet animating what would otherwise be a mere group of fantastic masque, as embarrassing to the antiquary, as to the mineralogist, the epigene crystal, formed by materials of one substance modelled on the perished crystals of another. The church of St. Mark’s itself, harmonious as its structure may at first sight appear, is an epitome of the changes of Venetian architecture from the tenth to the nineteenth century. Its crypt, and the line of low arches which support the screen, are apparently the earliest portions; the lower stories of the main fabric are of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with later Gothic interpolations; the pinnacles are of the earliest fully developed Venetian Gothic (fourteenth century); but one of them, that on the projection at the eastern extremity of the Piazzetta de Leoni, is of far finer, and probably earlier workmanship than all the rest. The southern range of pinnacles is again inferior to the northern and western, and visibly of later date. Then the screen, which most writers have described as part of the original fabric, bears its date inscribed on its architrave, 1394, and with it are associated a multitude of small screens, balustrades, decorations of the interior building, and probably the rose window of the south transept. Then come the interpolated traceries of the front and sides; then the crocketings of the upper arches, extravagances of the incipient Renaissance: and, finally, the figures which carry the waterspouts on the north side—utterly barbarous seventeenth or eighteenth century work—connect the whole with the plastered restorations of the year 1844 and 1845. Most of the palaces in Venice have sustained interpolations hardly less numerous; and those of the Ducal Palace are so intricate, that a year’s labor would probably be insufficient altogether to disentangle and define them. I therefore gave up all thoughts of obtaining a perfectly clear chronological view of the early architecture; but the dates necessary to the main purposes of the book the reader will find well established; and of the evidence brought forward for those of less importance, he is himself to judge. Doubtful estimates are never made grounds of argument; and the accuracy of the account of the buildings themselves, for which alone I pledge myself, is of course entirely independent of them.
In like manner, as the statements briefly made in the chapters on construction involve questions so difficult and so general, that I cannot hope that every expression referring to them will be found free from error: and as the conclusions to which I have endeavored to lead the reader are thrown into a form the validity of which depends on that of each successive step, it might be argued, if fallacy or weakness could be detected in one of them, that all the subsequent reasonings were valueless. The reader may be assured, however, that it is not so; the method of proof used in the following essay being only one out of many which were in my choice, adopted because it seemed to me the shortest and simplest, not as being the strongest. In many cases, the conclusions are those which men of quick feeling would arrive at instinctively; and I then sought to discover the reasons of what so strongly recommended itself as truth. Though these reasons could every one of them, from the beginning to the end of the book, be proved insufficient, the truth of its conclusions would remain the same. I should only regret that I had dishonored them by an ill-grounded defence; and endeavor to repair my error by a better one.
I have not, however, written carelessly; nor should I in any wise have expressed doubt of the security of the following argument, but that it is physically impossible for me, being engaged quite as much with mountains, and clouds, and trees, and criticism of painting, as with architecture, to verify, as I should desire, the expression of every sentence bearing upon empirical and technical matters. Life is not long enough; nor does a day pass by without causing me to feel more bitterly the impossibility of carrying out to the extent which I should desire, the separate studies which general criticism continually forces me to undertake. I can only assure the reader, that he will find the certainty of every statement I permit myself to make, increase with its importance; and that, for the security of the final conclusions of the following essay, as well as for the resolute veracity of its account of whatever facts have come under my own immediate cognizance, I will pledge myself to the uttermost.
It was necessary, to the accomplishment of the purpose of the work (of which account is given in the First Chapter), that I should establish some canons of judgment, which the general reader should thoroughly understand, and, if it pleased him, accept, before we took cognizance, together, of any architecture whatsoever. It has taken me more time and trouble to do this than I expected; but, if I have succeeded, the thing done will be of use for many other purposes than that to which it is now put. The establishment of these canons, which I have called “the Foundations,” and some account of the connection of Venetian architecture with that of the rest of Europe, have filled the present volume. The second will, I hope, contain all I have to say about Venice itself.
It was of course inexpedient to reduce drawings of crowded details to the size of an octavo volume—I do not say impossible, but inexpedient; requiring infinite pains on the part of the engraver, with no result except farther pains to the beholder. And as, on the other hand, folio books are not easy reading, I determined to separate the text and the unreducible plates. I have given, with the principal text, all the illustrations absolutely necessary to the understanding of it, and, in the detached work, such additional text as has special reference to the larger illustrations.
A considerable number of these larger plates were at first intended to be executed in tinted lithography; but, finding the result unsatisfactory, I have determined to prepare the principal subjects for mezzotinting—a change of method requiring two new drawings to be made of every subject; one a carefully penned outline for the etcher, and then a finished drawing upon the etching. This work does not proceed fast, while I am also occupied with the completion of the text; but the numbers of it will appear as fast as I can prepare them.
For the illustrations of the body of the work itself, I have used any kind of engraving which seemed suited to the subjects—line and mezzotint, on steel, with mixed lithographs and woodcuts, at considerable loss of uniformity in the appearance of the volume, but, I hope, with advantage, in rendering the character of the architecture it describes. And both in the plates and the text I have aimed chiefly at clear intelligibility; that any one, however little versed in the subject, might be able to take up the book, and understand what it meant forthwith. I have utterly failed of my purpose, if I have not made all the essential parts of the essay intelligible to the least learned, and easy to the most desultory readers, who are likely to take interest in the matter at all. There are few passages which even require so much as an acquaintance with the elements of Euclid, and these may be missed, without harm to the sense of the rest, by every reader to whom they may appear mysterious; and the architectural terms necessarily employed (which are very few) are explained as they occur, or in a note; so that, though I may often be found trite or tedious, I trust that I shall not be obscure. I am especially anxious to rid this essay of ambiguity, because I want to gain the ear of all kinds of persons. Every man has, at some time of his life, personal interest in architecture. He has influence on the design of some public building; or he has to buy, or build, or alter his own house. It signifies less whether the knowledge of other arts be general or not; men may live without buying pictures or statues: but, in architecture, all must in some way commit themselves; they must do mischief, and waste their money, if they do not know how to turn it to account. Churches, and shops, and warehouses, and cottages, and small row, and place, and terrace houses, must be built, and lived in, however joyless or inconvenient. And it is assuredly intended that all of us should have knowledge, and act upon our knowledge, in matters with which we are daily concerned, and not to be left to the caprice of architects or mercy of contractors. There is not, indeed, anything in the following essay bearing on the special forms and needs of modern buildings; but the principles it inculcates are universal; and they are illustrated from the remains of a city which should surely be interesting to the men of London, as affording the richest existing examples of architecture raised by a mercantile community, for civil uses, and domestic magnificence.
Denmark Hill, February, 1851.
CHAPTER I.THE QUARRY.
§ I. Since the first dominion of men was asserted over the ocean, 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.
The exaltation, the sin, and the punishment of Tyre have been recorded for us, in perhaps the most touching words ever uttered by the Prophets of Israel against the cities of the stranger. But we read them as a lovely song; and close our ears to the sternness of their warning: for the very depth of the Fall of Tyre has blinded us to its reality, and we forget, as we watch the bleaching of the rocks between the sunshine and the sea, that they were once “as in Eden, the garden of God.”
Her successor, like her in perfection of beauty, though less in endurance of dominion, is still left for our beholding in the final period of her decline: a ghost upon the sands of the sea, so weak—so quiet—so bereft of all but her loveliness, that we might well doubt, as we watched her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which was the City, and which the Shadow.
I would endeavor to trace the lines of this image before it be for ever lost, and to record, as far as I may, the warning which seems to me to be uttered by every one of the fast-gaining waves, that beat, like passing bells, against the Stones of Venice.
§ II. It would be difficult to overrate the value of the lessons which might be derived from a faithful study of the history of this strange and mighty city: a history which, in spite of the labor of countless chroniclers, remains in vague and disputable outline—barred with brightness and shade, like the far away edge of her own ocean, where the surf and the sand-bank are mingled with the sky. The inquiries in which we have to engage will hardly render this outline clearer, but their results will, in some degree, alter its aspect; and, so far as they bear upon it at all, they possess an interest of a far higher kind than that usually belonging to architectural investigations. I may, perhaps, in the outset, and in few words, enable the general reader to form a clearer idea of the importance of every existing expression of Venetian character through Venetian art, and of the breadth of interest which the true history of Venice embraces, than he is likely to have gleaned from the current fables of her mystery or magnificence.
§ III. Venice is usually conceived as an oligarchy: She was so during a period less than the half of her existence, and that including the days of her decline; and it is one of the first questions needing severe examination, whether that decline was owing in any wise to the change in the form of her government, or altogether, as assuredly in great part, to changes, in the character of the persons of whom it was composed.
The state of Venice existed Thirteen Hundred and Seventy-six years, from the first establishment of a consular government on the island of the Rialto,1 to the moment when the General-in-chief of the French army of Italy pronounced the Venetian republic a thing of the past. Of this period, Two Hundred and Seventy-six2 years were passed in a nominal subjection to the cities of old Venetia, especially to Padua, and in an agitated form of democracy, of which the executive appears to have been entrusted to tribunes,3 chosen, one by the inhabitants of each of the principal islands. For six hundred years,4 during which the power of Venice was continually on the increase, her government was an elective monarchy, her King or doge possessing, in early times at least, as much independent authority as any other European sovereign, but an authority gradually subjected to limitation, and shortened almost daily of its prerogatives, while it increased in a spectral and incapable magnificence. The final government of the nobles, under the image of a king, lasted for five hundred years, during which Venice reaped the fruits of her former energies, consumed them—and expired.
§ IV. Let the reader therefore conceive the existence of the Venetian state as broadly divided into two periods: the first of nine hundred, the second of five hundred years, the separation being marked by what was called the “Serrar del Consiglio;” that is to say, the final and absolute distinction of the nobles from the commonalty, and the establishment of the government in their hands to the exclusion alike of the influence of the people on the one side, and the authority of the doge on the other.
Then the first period, of nine hundred years, presents us with the most interesting spectacle of a people struggling out of anarchy into order and power; and then governed, for the most part, by the worthiest and noblest man whom they could find among them,5 called their Doge or Leader, with an aristocracy gradually and resolutely forming itself around him, out of which, and at last by which, he was chosen; an aristocracy owing its origin to the accidental numbers, influence, and wealth of some among the families of the fugitives from the older Venetia, and gradually organizing itself, by its unity and heroism, into a separate body.
This first period includes the rise of Venice, her noblest achievements, and the circumstances which determined her character and position among European powers; and within its range, as might have been anticipated, we find the names of all her hero princes—of Pietro Urseolo, Ordalafo Falier, Domenico Michieli, Sebastiano Ziani, and Enrico Dandolo.
§ V. The second period opens with a hundred and twenty years, the most eventful in the career of Venice—the central struggle of her life—stained with her darkest crime, the murder of Carrara—disturbed by her most dangerous internal sedition, the conspiracy of Falier—oppressed by her most fatal war, the war of Chiozza—and distinguished by the glory of her two noblest citizens (for in this period the heroism of her citizens replaces that of her monarchs), Vittor Pisani and Carlo Zeno.
I date the commencement of the Fall of Venice from the death of Carlo Zeno, 8th May, 1418;6 the visible commencement from that of another of her noblest and wisest children, the Doge Tomaso Mocenigo, who expired five years later. The reign of Foscari followed, gloomy with pestilence and war; a war in which large acquisitions of territory were made by subtle or fortunate policy in Lombardy, and disgrace, significant as irreparable, sustained in the battles on the Po at Cremona, and in the marshes of Caravaggio. In 1454, Venice, the first of the states of Christendom, humiliated herself to the Turk: in the same year was established the Inquisition of State,7 and from this period her government takes the perfidious and mysterious form under which it is usually conceived. In 1477, the great Turkish invasion spread terror to the shores of the lagoons; and in 1508 the league of Cambrai marks the period usually assigned as the commencement of the decline of the Venetian power;8 the commercial prosperity of Venice in the close of the fifteenth century blinding her historians to the previous evidence of the diminution of her internal strength.
§ VI. Now there is apparently a significative coincidence between the establishment of the aristocratic and oligarchical powers, and the diminution of the prosperity of the state. But this is the very question at issue; and it appears to me quite undetermined by any historian, or determined by each in accordance with his own prejudices. It is a triple question: first, whether the oligarchy established by the efforts of individual ambition was the cause, in its subsequent operation, of the Fall of Venice; or (secondly) whether the establishment of the oligarchy itself be not the sign and evidence, rather than the cause, of national enervation; or (lastly) whether, as I rather think, the history of Venice might not be written almost without reference to the construction of her senate or the prerogatives of her Doge. It is the history of a people eminently at unity in itself, descendants of Roman race, long disciplined by adversity, and compelled by its position either to live nobly or to perish:—for a thousand years they fought for life; for three hundred they invited death: their battle was rewarded, and their call was heard.
§ VII. Throughout her career, the victories of Venice, and, at many periods of it, her safety, were purchased by individual heroism; and the man who exalted or saved her was sometimes (oftenest) her king, sometimes a noble, sometimes a citizen. To him no matter, nor to her: the real question is, not so much what names they bore, or with what powers they were entrusted, as how they were trained; how they were made masters of themselves, servants of their country, patient of distress, impatient of dishonor; and what was the true reason of the change from the time when she could find saviours among those whom she had cast into prison, to that when the voices of her own children commanded her to sign covenant with Death.9
§ VIII. On this collateral question I wish the reader’s mind to be fixed throughout all our subsequent inquiries. It will give double interest to every detail: nor will the interest be profitless; for the evidence which I shall be able to deduce from the arts of Venice will be both frequent and irrefragable, that the decline of her political prosperity was exactly coincident with that of domestic and individual religion.[1q]
I say domestic and individual; for—and this is the second point which I wish the reader to keep in mind—the most curious phenomenon in all Venetian history is the vitality of religion in private life, and its deadness in public policy. Amidst the enthusiasm, chivalry, or fanaticism of the other states of Europe, Venice stands, from first to last, like a masked statue; her coldness impenetrable, her exertion only aroused by the touch of a secret spring. That spring was her commercial interest—this the one motive of all her important political acts, or enduring national animosities. She could forgive insults to her honor, but never rivalship in her commerce; she calculated the glory of her conquests by their value, and estimated their justice by their facility. The fame of success remains, when the motives of attempt are forgotten; and the casual reader of her history may perhaps be surprised to be reminded, that the expedition which was commanded by the noblest of her princes, and whose results added most to her military glory, was one in which while all Europe around her was wasted by the fire of its devotion, she first calculated the highest price she could exact from its piety for the armament she furnished, and then, for the advancement of her own private interests, at once broke her faith10 and betrayed her religion.
§ IX. And yet, in the midst of this national criminality, we shall be struck again and again by the evidences of the most noble individual feeling. The tears of Dandolo were not shed in hypocrisy, though they could not blind him to the importance of the conquest of Zara. The habit of assigning to religion a direct influence over all his own actions, and all the affairs of his own daily life, is remarkable in every great Venetian during the times of the prosperity of the state; nor are instances wanting in which the private feeling of the citizens reaches the sphere of their policy, and even becomes the guide of its course where the scales of expediency are doubtfully balanced. I sincerely trust that the inquirer would be disappointed who should endeavor to trace any more immediate reasons for their adoption of the cause of Alexander III. against Barbarossa, than the piety which was excited by the character of their suppliant, and the noble pride which was provoked by the insolence of the emperor. But the heart of Venice is shown only in her hastiest councils; her worldly spirit recovers the ascendency whenever she has time to calculate the probabilities of advantage, or when they are sufficiently distinct to need no calculation; and the entire subjection of private piety to national policy is not only remarkable throughout the almost endless series of treacheries and tyrannies by which her empire was enlarged and maintained, but symbolised by a very singular circumstance in the building of the city itself. I am aware of no other city of Europe in which its cathedral was not the principal feature. But the principal church in Venice was the chapel attached to the palace of her prince, and called the “Chiesa Ducale.” The patriarchal church,11 inconsiderable in size and mean in decoration, stands on the outermost islet of the Venetian group, and its name, as well as its site, is probably unknown to the greater number of travellers passing hastily through the city. Nor is it less worthy of remark, that the two most important temples of Venice, next to the ducal chapel, owe their size and magnificence, not to national effort, but to the energy of the Franciscan and Dominican monks, supported by the vast organization of those great societies on the mainland of Italy, and countenanced by the most pious, and perhaps also, in his generation, the most wise, of all the princes of Venice,12 who now rests beneath the roof of one of those very temples, and whose life is not satirized by the images of the Virtues which a Tuscan sculptor has placed around his tomb.
§ X. There are, therefore, two strange and solemn lights in which we have to regard almost every scene in the fitful history of the Rivo Alto. We find, on the one hand, a deep and constant tone of individual religion characterising the lives of the citizens of Venice in her greatness; we find this spirit influencing them in all the familiar and immediate concerns of life, giving a peculiar dignity to the conduct even of their commercial transactions, and confessed by them with a simplicity of faith that may well put to shame the hesitation with which a man of the world at present admits (even if it be so in reality) that religious feeling has any influence over the minor branches of his conduct. And we find as the natural consequence of all this, a healthy serenity of mind and energy of will expressed in all their actions, and a habit of heroism which never fails them, even when the immediate motive of action ceases to be praiseworthy. With the fulness of this spirit the prosperity of the state is exactly correspondent, and with its failure her decline, and that with a closeness and precision which it will be one of the collateral objects of the following essay to demonstrate from such accidental evidence as the field of its inquiry presents. And, thus far, all is natural and simple. But the stopping short of this religious faith when it appears likely to influence national action, correspondent as it is, and that most strikingly, with several characteristics of the temper of our present English legislature, is a subject, morally and politically, of the most curious interest and complicated difficulty; one, however, which the range of my present inquiry will not permit me to approach, and for the treatment of which I must be content to furnish materials in the light I may be able to throw upon the private tendencies of the Venetian character.
§ XI. There is, however, another most interesting feature in the policy of Venice which will be often brought before us; and which a Romanist would gladly assign as the reason of its irreligion; namely, the magnificent and successful struggle which she maintained against the temporal authority of the Church of Rome. It is true that, in a rapid survey of her career, the eye is at first arrested by the strange drama to which I have already alluded, closed by that ever memorable scene in the portico of St. Mark’s,13
