Customer Reviews

The Stones of Venice

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is an abridged version of the original 3 volumes, but a delightful book -- both for the opinions expressed and the wonderful pomposity with which they are presented. It's impossible not to learn about art and architecture from this book, but it also (perhaps not intentionally) makes Woody Allen's or Steve Martin's New Yorker pieces seem like downers. The man has no humility and there is no opinion other than his, yet somehow the clarity and vitality of his description allows you to continue reading. I was fortunate enough to pick this up in Venice, so I was able to search out his examples of the 5 worst buildings in Venice, and similar Ruskinisms.

This is misleading...not even 5% of the Ruskin masterwork is printed in this book.

I haven't read this yet, but I thought I would warn other buyers that this is not the full text of the Stones of Venice--it is abridged. J. G. Links seems confident that he has done so in an intelligent way; perhaps he will win me over...

Amazon frequently mixes reader reviews of various editions of a given classic work. Such is the case here. Be advised that if you are now veiwing the Dover 3 vol. edition of Ruskin's The Stones of Venice, it is the UNABRIDGED edition of this work. Not a single word is missing. As such, this is the ultimate edition to own.

Hey, guys! A lot of the reviews of this book are complaining that the text is abridged. No! This book is the first of THREE VOLUMES which, together, make up the entire "Stones of Venice." To get the whole thing, you need to buy Volumes 10 and 11 as well, not just Volume 9. (N.B., "The Nature of Gothic," the best-known part, is in Volume 10.) It's all there. You just weren't looking in the right place.

That having been said, it's a shame that one has to spend about $300 to get the complete text in a nice, hardbound format. But it's still a worthy investment.

This edition of STONES OF VENICE is a lamentably shortened version of the original. Yet is still contains enough of that to provide a clear clue why Socialism has as powerful attraction as it does for the upper class elite as it did back in Ruskin's day.

In The Stones of Venice, John Ruskin creates a parallel between the Gothic style of architecture and the often tangled mixture of various pairs of discrete elements: the architect's mind and the social milieu, the worker's skill and the worker's trade guild, and the need for precision in stone cutting and a need not to overly focus on that precision. "The Nature of Gothic" is a chapter from that book in which he considers the current state of Gothic architecture: "I shall endeavor to give the reader in this chapter an idea...of the true nature of Gothic architecture, properly so-called; not of that of Venice only, but of universal Gothic." He intends to inform the reader just how "far Venetian architecture reached the universal or perfect type of Gothic, and how far it either fell short of it or assumed foreign and independent forms."

All buildings that are termed Gothic have an essence that Ruskin terms Gothicness, a concept whose abstractness renders a precise definition difficult. When people refer to this essence they often mention traits like gargoyles, pointed arches, and vaulted roofs. Ruskin is quick to add that it is misleading to consider them in isolation. It is further misleading when, even lumping them together, one fails to account for the spirit in which they were both planned and built. Ruskin suggests that it is only when one considers the external forms (arches, roofs, gargoyles) in a delicate union with the internal forms (the mindset of the builder, the social milieu of the age) that one may only then have a right to call that structure Gothic.

Ruskin writes that for a building to be rightfully called Gothic, that edifice must have a morally centered symmetry of six traits: Savageness, Changefulness, Naturalism, Grotesqueness, Rigidity, and Redundance.

Savageness: Ruskin counters the prevailing stereotype of Gothic as a reference to all that is barbaric or savage. The term, in his opinion, has unfortunately been applied derogatorily to all buildings that have "exhibited a degree of sternness and rudeness, which in contradistinction to the character of Southern and Eastern nations, appeared like a perpetual reflection of the contrast between the Goth and the Roman in their first encounter." It is further unfortunate that the architecture of fallen Rome "became the model for the imitation of civilized Europe." Ruskin is dismayed at the revival of Gothic architecture, a trend based more on the style rather than the substance of the original Gothic builders of the Roman Empire. The style of savageness that Ruskin so admires in the ancient Gothic buildings was based on the paradox that the obvious perfection of an object lies in the less obvious imperfection of any of its constituent parts. He draws an analogy between the perfection of a building's lines and the perfection of its builder. The former seems more nearly perfect because of the clarity and straightness of its lines. The latter also seems perfect but only because he has sacrificed his humanity to achieve the mindless ability to draw lines and angles. From this analogy, Ruskin extrapolates that the man can be a tool or the tool a man but one cannot have both. It is the very imperfection of man that makes his struggle to achieve perfection so glorious. As a further consequence, he anathematizes brute machines which accelerate the de-evolution of thinking man to soulless tool. When Ruskin urges his readers to look proudly about them at the clarity and precision of the things which they believe stamp England with immortal beauty, he counters with "Alas! If read rightly these perfections are signs of slavery in our England a thousand times more bitter and more degrading than that of the scourged African or helot Greek." When he urges these same readers to "gaze upon the old cathedral front where you have smiled so often at the fantastic ignorance of the old sculptors," Ruskin admonishes them not to mock these fronts, "For they are the signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone." Thus the savageness of Gothic architecture is more a virtue than a vice.

Changefulness: Ruskin provides "variety" as synonymous with "changefulness." If a worker is free to be imperfect, then it follows that it would be illogical and counterproductive to assume that the output of the imperfect worker must be perfection itself. Though Ruskin acknowledges that the English love order, it does not follow that "love of order is love of art." He continues by noting that "love of order has no more to do with our right enjoyment of architecture or painting than love of punctuality with the appreciation of an opera." The knowledgeable lover of Gothic art sees that the inner beauty of that art lies precisely in its "restlessness of the dreaming mind that wanders hither and thither among the niches and flickers feverishly around the pinnacles and frets and fades in labyrinthine knots and shadows along wall and roof."

Naturalism: Ruskin defines the term as "the love of natural objects for their own sake." It follows that the artist/builder has the obligation "to represent them frankly, unconstrained by artistical laws." As noted previously, most workmen can create the fact of a piece or the art of that piece but only the rarest and most gifted can do both. Ruskin does not suggest that this tri-part division is immutable. In fact, he adds that all three gently merge into imperceptible gradations. When any building is visibly and horrendously flawed both in concept and construction, "we are apt to find fault with the class of workmen, instead of finding fault with the particular abuse which has perverted their action." The original Gothic builders of antiquity were in the group that could do both, but in their case this group was more numerous than in the other two combined. In Ruskin's day, the ratio has reversed itself, with the ones who could do both in the vanishingly small minority.

Grotesqueness: Ruskin assumes that his readers will have no difficulty in connecting this term with "the tendency to delight in fantastic and ludicrous, as well as in sublime, images."

Rigidity: For Ruskin, rigidity implies not mere stability but active rigidity. Stiffness in movement is a desired trait, the purpose of which is to heighten specific qualities, such as presenting "the fiercest lightning forked rather than curved, and the stoutest oak-branch angular rather than bending." Buildings of the ancient Egyptian and Greek civilizations lacked rigidity, with their stones "passively incumbent on another." But Gothic edifices possessed sufficient rigidity analogous "to the bones of a limb or fibers of a tree." Further, ornaments of the former seem to have been merely "stamped with a seal," while those of the latter "stand out in prickly independence and frosty fortitude." Ruskin connects the freezing temperatures of northern Europe to the understandable if subconscious desire on the part of the northern builders to imbue their creations with the mark of the icicle. Further, such cold climes force the builders to use materials of the roughest sort, "compelling the workman to seek for vigor of effect, rather than refinement of texture or accuracy of form." From this, he concludes that it is precisely here that accounts for the stark architectural differences between the low temperatures of the north and the milder temperatures of the south. Ruskin warns the reader that "the best Gothic building is not that which is most Gothic." One cannot suffer from an excess of savagery, of changefulness, of naturalism, or even of grotesqueness, but one can surely suffer from a plethora of rigidity. He compares an oversupply of rigidity to an excessive application of Puritanism. A little bit of both goes a long way.

Redundance: Ruskin calls redundance the least essential of the group. A building is beautiful precisely because its beauty relies "almost exclusively on loveliness of simple design and grace of uninvolved proportion." Less, he implies, is more. Humility, rather than braggadocio of design, is key.

John Ruskin's relation to art was not limited to one who merely loved art though he did so passionately. He saw it as his bounden duty in life to proselytize and to moralize so as to convince others of the validity of his vision that life, art, and morality were commingled in an inexorable bear hug from which one could never disengage. Lying discretely behind this messianic impulse to convert was his Puritan-induced sense of reality. All of art had to conform to a passionate fidelity of external reality to internalized art. In "The Nature of Gothic," Ruskin considers how reality impacts on the creation of and the perception of architecture. It was never enough for Ruskin to look at any aspect of art as "good" or "bad" or even "worthwhile." For him, art could not exist independently of that which gave it birth--the mindset of the builder, the milieu behind the builder, the often tangled web of relationships that propped up or destabilized the worker to his trade guild, or even the geography which acted as an unobtrusive canvas for the art and its artist. Out of all the arts of which man could produce it was architecture that most readily permitted the builder to make an immortal statement less about the artifact and more about himself.

The general thrust of "The Nature of Gothic" is to justify the existence of medieval Gothic architects as those who were thoroughly imbued with the spirit of restlessness, motivation, imperfection, yet endlessly creative for all that. By contrast, this ennobling spirit of brash creativity had slowly fizzled away until by his own century Gothic architecture was no more than a pale reflection of halcyon years. There were various targets for him to point fingers of blame, the most prominent being what he deemed the soul-destroying power of the Mighty Machine of industrialism. By 1851, Ruskin was well on his way to accepting the Socialist doctrines then spreading throughout Europe. Almost certainly, Ruskin was familiar with Marx's Communist Manifesto. In his Stones of Venice and in many of his later works, Ruskin would rail against creeping capitalism, silk-hatted factory owners, free-market enterprise, and a general lack of appreciation for the lot of the common worker. Added to these doctrines was his belief that human beings tended to fit a mold and could be counted on to act in pre-determined ways. Individuality counted far less than collective action. Where Marx might shout: "Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains," Ruskin might substitute "architects" for "workers."

In order for Ruskin to lend credence to his theory that Gothic architecture had suffered an irreversible decline since the Middle Ages, he noted six categories of Gothicism, all of which had to be present for contemporary builders to include in their building designs. Beginning with savageness, the first criterion, Ruskin waxes pessimistically over the likelihood that current architects will ever regain the deft touches of their forebears. He does not blame the individual builders for an excess of laziness, stupidity, or greed. Rather, he blames the social fabric that encouraged the dissolution of formerly high principles of art and life. If workers, stonecutters, architects, and craftsmen of all types are deficient in the six types of needed traits, then the fault lies with the dehumanization of the worker by the factory system--a key component of Marxist dogma. Nowhere in any of Ruskin's books does he allow for any other explanation for the decline of art and morality. If the stones of Venice were indeed broken to create a flawed and ugly environment that matched an equally flawed and ugly soul of society, then Ruskin's claim that the source of all this lay in capitalism may need a more objective view than his.

The Stones of Venice is beautifully written and a must-read for anyone interested in art, architecture, Venice, and Victorian literature. The massive original has been pared down here into a much more manageable volume without sacrificing its brilliant prose and insightful commentary. It'll easily fit in your carry-on luggage for your next trip to Italy.

As much as I appreciate and respect the work of the editor, I was distresed to find that passages in which Ruskin addressed labor reform were left out. This was in Chapter 6. In the original, Ruskin argued for preserving the integrity of individual workers. I found that this edition left out pages that concerned labor reform, making the work appear to concern architecture alone. If you are interested in Ruskin's views on society, then, be cautious of this. For my part, I ended up resorting to the Norton Anthology of Literature for the text I needed.

In the "Gothic" passage of SoV Ruskin wrote quite forcefully in defense of labor. He emphasized how important it is for buildings to show the work of individual workers. Signs of their work are an essential part of the architecture, he contended. Much of this argument does not appear in this edition.

It remains a wonderful work for those who are interested in the architecture alone.