The document provides an overview of John Ruskin's book "The Stones of Venice" including: 1. Questions to consider about the significance of the book's title and its links to Ruskin's earlier work "The Seven Lamps of Architecture". 2. An introduction to concepts in the book like superimposition, ornamentation, and the nature of Gothic architecture. 3. A detailed summary of chapters on St. Mark's Square and Basilica in Venice that analyze the architecture, history, and Christian moral values represented.

1. by Airlie Maria Heung
SEMINAR PRESENTATION

2. • Why did Ruskin name the book “The Stones of
Venice”? What is the significance and what did it
imply?
• How is this book linked/similar to the Seven Lamps
of Architecture?
• How are they different?
• Why put the chapter St Mark’s before The Nature of
Gothic?
• What is the main idea Ruskin wishes to express?
QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT
DURING THE PRESENTATION

3. • The Quarry
• The Virtues of Architecture
Act well, speak well, look well
• The 6 Divisions of Architecture:
Walls, piers, lintels, arches for roofing, buttresses
& apertures
INTRODUCTION TO STONES OF
VENICE: BOOK I

4. • Superimposition: Weight on lightness, lightness on weight
• Ornament: Material—Abstract lines, forms of earth (crystals),
forms of water (waves), forms of fire (flames and rays), forms of
air (clouds), organic forms (shells & fish), reptiles & insects,
vegetation (stems and trunks), vegetation (foliage), birds,
mammalian animals and Man; Treatment: distance
• The Throne
• Torcello: mother and daughter widowhood—Torcello and
Venice
INTRODUCTION TO STONES OF
VENICE: BOOK I , II

5. • History of St. Theodore, St. Mark, the Venetian gov. moved
to Rialto, the Ducal Palace and finally St. Mark’s Basilica
• Byzantine architects restoration of St. Mark’s
1. Gothic school: pinnacles, upper archivolts,
window traceries
2. Renaissance school: Titian & Tintoret enable
imagination and lament what is destroyed
(11th, 14th Gothic additions, 17th restored mosaics)
• English cathedral walk before entering Venice’s everyday
buildings
ST MARK’S INTRODUCTION

6. SHORT CLIP

7. ST MARKS SQUARE (PIAZZA SAN
MARCO) WITH THE BASILICA

10. • Bocca di Piazza (mouth of the
square)
• chequered stones, countless arches in
symmetryobedience
• multitude of pillars and white domes,
part gold and opal,
• hollowed into 5 great vaulted porches
ceiled with fair mosaics
• sculpture of alabaster, clear as amber
delicate as ivory, of nature and angels
• Morning light Eden
• Here we see the Fig-Tree Angles with
the leaves that clothed Adam & Eve
ST MARK’S SQUARE

11. • Cross, signs of
heaven, seasons upon
the earth, glittering
pinnacles mixed with
white arches and
scarlet flowers
• Greek horses blazing
in their breadth of
golden strength St
Mark’s Lion

13. LAMENTS ON ST MARK’S
SQUARE BEFORE ENTERING
THE BASILICA

14. INTERIOR OF ST. MARK’S
BASILICA

15. • Vast cave hewn into the form of a Cross
• Divided into shadowy aisles of pillars
• Round the domes of the roof enters only through narrow
apertures like large stars
• Wanders of darkness, torches, silver lamps burning ceaselessly in
the recesses
• Walls covered with alabaster. One picture passing into another as
in a dream
• Lead always to the Cross
• Confessed Incrustation
ST MARKS BASILICA

16. • 1. Choice either to lodge his few blocks of precious
marble here and there among his masses of brick, and
cut out of the sculptured fragments such new forms
for observance of fixed proportions of new building
• 2. Cut the colored stones into thin pieces , of extent
sufficient to face the whole surface of the walls and
adopt a method of construction irregular enough to
admit the insertion of fragmentary sculptures
• An architect should choose the latter to preserve noble
work
LOCATION & CONTRASTS:

17. • Venetians as the only Europeans to
have sympathized to the full with
the great instinct of the Eastern
racesartists from Constantinople
to design mosaics of the vaults of
St. Mark’s and to group the colors
of the porchespalaces with
porphyry & gold
• School of incrusted architecture is
the only in which perfect and
permanent chromatic decoration is
possible (strength of the edifice to
be in the brick clothed with the
brightness of the marble)
COLOR

18. • Degree of Gothicness
• Internal elements: Fancifulness, love of variety, love
of richness Mental Expression
• External form: pointed arches, vaulted roofs
Material Form
THE NATURE OF GOTHIC

19. 1. Savageness (Savageness/ Rudeness)
2. Changefulness (Love of Change)
3. Naturalism (Love of Nature)
4. Grotesqueness (Disturbed Imagination)
5. Rigidity (Obstinacy)
6. Redundance ( Generosity)
MORAL ELEMENTS IN THE ORDER OF IMPORTANCE TO
THE BUILDING (& BUILDER):

20. • Contrasts the North and Southern Savageness
• 1. Servile ornament enduring imperfection
• 2. Constitutional ornament condemning mass
production perfection as unhumanizing, slavery
• 3. Revolutionary ornament
should not divide the work of the thinker and the
maker because it obstructs the expression and creates
hostility between the two
SAVAGENESS

21. • Perpetual variety of every feature in the building
• Enslaved perfection vs less degraded less similar parts of the
building
• If as in Gothic work, there is a perpetual change both in design
and execution, the workman must have been altogether set free
• Contrast English architecture’s love of order do not let us
suppose that love of order is love of art
• Cannot read a building as we read Milton and Dante and getting
the same delight
• Great art whether expressing itself in words, colors or stones
doesn NOT say the same thing over and over again new and
different things entertaining  easy to copy
CHANGEFULNESS

22. • Necessity: in monotony
• Renaissance capable of perpetual novelty
• Gothic love of variety, exhibited that love,
culminating energies
• Eg sublimity in music
CHANGEFULNESS

23. • The love of natural objects for their own sake and to represent
them frankly
• workman is left free to represent what subject he chooses, he
must look into nature that is round him for material , with more
or less accuracy and play of fancy
• Western Gothic represent facts VS
Eastern (Arabian, Persian, Chinese) harmony in colors and forms
NATURALISM:

24. 1. Purist
2. Naturalist takes both the purist‘s and sensualist‘s and
make one whole
3. Sensualist
Short sight in nature
The Gothic builders were naturalists firm in his
rendering of imaginative as of actual truthvs Roman/
Byzantine, realizes the utmost eg. Purgatory fire
Greek sculptors confess of own feebleness, and with the
scriptures copious records
NATURALISM

25. • Gothic peculiar fondness to forms of vegetation (foliage)
struggled with accuracy
• Rudeness and the love of changed mingled with the rudeness
of ignorance.
• Prophecy of development of entire body of natural sciences,
medicine, literature, domestic wisdom and national peace.
• nourishment of the mind
FORMS OF VEGETATION

26. HE SAYS HE WILL ELABORATE ON THE ELEMENT OF
GROTESQUE IN VOLUME III

27. • Stable, active rigidity; the peculiar energy which gives tension
to movement and stiffness to resistance
• Gothic rigidity: Stiffness, elastic tension, studious
• Independence
• Languor south cold as evil and soon forgotten
• Northern Goth
RIGIDITY

28. • Uncalculating bestowal of the wealth of its labor
accumulation of ornament, most influence on the
minds of men attained by means of this attribute alone
• Admit the rudeness, paradoxical but part of the
humility.
• Humility shown not in imperfection but in the
accumulation of ornament, as the roughness
• Sympathy
• Universe of faultless beauty on measureless spaces
REDUNDANCE

29. • Outward form: more or less Gothic in proportion to the
number of Gothic forms which it unites.
• Composed of pointed arches
• Roof: roof proper and rook mask
• Gable (snow in north)
 “Gothic architecture is that which uses the pointed arch for to
roof proper , and the gable for the roof mask.”
GOTHIC OUTWARD FORM

30. • Manner depends on which this protection stands if
narrow or wide
• Vaulting of a bridge
• Wagon vault
• Nature of the curve  Gothic (ribs, domical shells)
• All good Gothic is nothing more than development,
endlessly rearranged and repeated
ROOF

31. • Ought to be a curved gable
• Sides curved in order to enable them to bear pressure from
without.
• 3 ways in which intervals can be bridged:
• 1. Lintel
• 2. Round arch
• 3. Gable (Gothic)
• National limitations?
TRUE NATURE OF POINTED
ARCH

32. • 1. Greek lintelbarbarous
• 2. Romanesque round arch East/Western, or
Byzantine/ LombardicArabian Gothic and
Teutonic Gothic and most perfect Byzantine St Marks
at Venice.
• 3. Gothic gableWest/East, Pure Gothic/Arabian
Gothic

33. Western:
1. Greek
2. Western Romanesque
3. Western true Gothic law of separation
“Gothic gables must have all its angle acute”
“Romanesque must have upper obtuse”
Masonary pointed arch discussed at
lengthneither fall out nor in.

34. • Foliation: Gothic naturalism, the love of foliage was
exactly proportionedsouthern soft, northern
thorn laid out in gold in color
• Love of leafage: form of arch “invested with the same
characters of beauty which the designer had
discovered in the leaf
• ”Foliated architecture, which uses the pointed arch
for the roof proper, and the gable for the roof-mask”
FOLIAGE

35. 1. If the roof rises in steep gable, high above the walls
2. If the principal windows and doors have pointed arches
with gables over them
3. Arches are cusped or apertures foliated
4. Arches in general carried on with true shafts with bases
and capitals
5. Plain openings in the walls, studious simple, unmoulded at
the sides
RULES FOR GOOD GOTHIC:

36. 1. Built by strong men
2. Irregular
3. Traceries, capitals, other ornaments are
perpetually varied design
4. Read the sculpture
GOOD ARCHITECTURE:

37. • Why did Ruskin name the book “The Stones of Venice”? What
significance did it imply?
• He analyzes not only the external form of architecture in
Venice’s cathedral but also the internal elements, the history and
morals of the Venice cathedrals
• How is this book linked/similar to the Seven Lamps of
Architecture?
• Both books analyzes cathedral architecture and Christian moral
values.
• How are the two books different?
• Seven Lamps of Architecture lays the foundation for what to look
for in architecture, whereas The Stones of Venice, St. Marks
and The Nature of Gothic especially, is a case study to further
explain the ideas
THE QUESTIONS

38. • Why put the chapter St Mark’s before The Nature of
Gothic?
• St. Mark’s is a visual example of the Gothic before
going into The Nature of Gothic
• What is the main idea he wishes to express?
• Ruskin wishes to illuminate through the ideas of
internal elements and external forms of Gothic
cathedral architecture the biblical morals that also
relates to a nations happiness.
THE QUESTIONS

39. SHORT CLIP