ABSTRACT

Ruskin's study of Venetian architecture, art and culture, The Stones of Venice, published in three volumes between 1851 and 1853, was not intended to be a history as we would now understand it. It was a moral argument, and a political intervention. As Elizabeth Helsinger has argued in an essay on Ruskin's historiography: 'The historical account of Venetian architecture in The Stones of Venice is reshaped throughout by an extrahistorical intention: to celebrate medieval art and values and condemn, on moral as well as aes­ thetic grounds, Renaissance Italy and nineteenth-century England/1 It was also a further contribution, following on from The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), to a contemporary debate in Britain about the right direction for the Gothic Revival.