The Stones of Venice

John Ruskin was an English critic of art, architecture, and society during the Victorian era. Born in 1819 as the son of a successful wine merchant, he was educated at home and then attended Oxford University. The family’s wealth allowed Ruskin to travel extensively in Britain and continental Europe to study its art and architecture, and writing about these subjects emerged as Ruskin’s main interest from his teen years onward.

As a young critic, Ruskin defended the then-ultramodern landscape paintings of J. M. W. Turner and also championed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of English painters who sympathized with the values and crafts of the Middle Ages over the modern academic painting and the Industrial Revolution. Ruskin himself shared many of these beliefs and would advocate for art’s moral and social purposes in such writings as The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), Modern Painters (1843-1860), and numerous lectures and essays.

Published in 1851-1853 after an extensive stay in Italy, The Stones of Venice expressed Ruskin’s conviction that art and architecture are closely connected to society, history, and culture. By telling the history of Venice through its visible monuments, he suggested how a society can both come to fruition and fall into decay morally and spiritually through art. Through his writings, Ruskin helped make art appreciation and collecting popular among the newly-powerful middle classes in England, the social environment in which he grew up. By carefully describing the physical condition of the buildings he visited, he played an essential role in fostering the modern conservation movement, while his emphasis on the relationship between nature and society has been linked with the growth of environmentalism.

Ruskin married Effie Gray in 1848, but the marriage was dissolved six years later and Ruskin spent the rest of his life writing, lecturing, and lending financial support to new building projects that reflected his aesthetic ideals. Having retired to the English countryside in Lancashire, he died there in January 1900.

Although his ideas became unfashionable after his death, Ruskin has since been reevaluated as one of the major cultural figures of 19th-century England, whose influence spread internationally in such diverse areas as social reform, economics, the philosophy of art and architecture, and town planning. In addition to writing about art, Ruskin was himself a painter whose artwork has also gained respect.