The Stones of Venice

These chapters could be considered the major section of The Stones of Venice, as it outlines Ruskin’s views on the Gothic style. These considerations will ultimately lead to his argument for the revival of this style in England, stated most forcefully in the Conclusion. Ruskin’s description of the Gothic style in Chapter 4 was particularly influential on the participants in the Gothic Revival movement (See: Background). Ruskin defines Gothic in terms of various aesthetic and moral qualities, showing again his conviction that architecture expresses or reveals the temperament, thought, personality, and interests of the designer or builder, embodying the links between Art and Society’s Moral Health.

Building on this principle, Ruskin extends his analysis of Gothic architecture to a consideration of ethnic character. Ruskin draws a contrast between the “northern” and “southern” European temperaments, with Gothic seen as a typical product of the northern European personality since it developed principally in northern France and England. While Ruskin’s regional characterizations could be considered stereotypical and limiting today, they were used by many thinkers in the 19th century as a basis for analyzing European art and culture.

According to Ruskin, northern builders’ experience of a cold climate and a rough, wild environment caused them to work quickly and gave a “sharp energy” to their work. This temperament also gave northerners “strength of will, independence of character, resoluteness of purpose, impatience of undue control” and a “general tendency to set the individual reason against authority, and the individual deed against destiny” (175). Ruskin contrasts these qualities with the “languid submission […] to tradition, and purpose to fatality” (175) which he sees as characteristic of the southern peoples of Europe and which is manifest in their architecture—particularly its consistent reference to classical Greco-Roman style.

Thus, Ruskin’s advocacy of the Gothic style rests in part on a conception of a supposed “northern” ethnic identity. This is a cultural identity which includes the characteristics of the English people, especially as associated with the qualities of independence and individualism associated with Protestant culture. Moreover, Ruskin’s argument that the Gothic style embodies qualities of the “savage” and unpredictable relates to the values of the Romantic movement and reflect his motives in Revising the Standard Narrative of Art History, as Romanticism appreciated those qualities in art as opposed to the regularity and symmetry valued in classical art. Ruskin’s architectural program thus includes an implied element of ethnic pride as well as embodying the ideals of 19th-century Romanticism.