Architectural Sketch, Venice

1834–1900 · Virkested

Great Britain

10. april 1848

Married: Effie Gray

1849

“The Seven Lamps of Architecture”, the first book to bear his name

His growing interest in Gothic architecture produces a book with fourteen plates etched by the author: seven moral categories — sacrifice, truth, power, beauty, life, memory and obedience — that Ruskin considers vital to and inseparable from all architecture. It promotes a secular and Protestant form of Gothic and challenges the Catholic influence of the architect A. W. N. Pugin.

November 1849

In Venice with Effie: the sketches behind “The Stones of Venice”

In November 1849 the couple stay at the Hotel Danieli: Effie looks for company, while Ruskin works alone and hurries to draw the Ca' d'Oro and the Doge's Palace, fearing that the occupying Austrian troops will destroy them. These sketches and notes will grow into “The Stones of Venice”.

May 1851

Letters to The Times defending the Pre-Raphaelites

Millais and his fellow artists approach Ruskin through their mutual friend Coventry Patmore; Millais's “Christ in the House of His Parents” (1849–50), which some considered blasphemous, at first fails to impress him, but in May 1851 he writes letters to The Times defending the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

1851–1853

The three-volume “Stones of Venice”

Growing from a technical history of Venetian architecture, from the Byzantine to the Renaissance, into a broad cultural history, the work is a warning to contemporary England about the moral and spiritual health of society: Ruskin explains the decline of Venice by the loss of true Christian faith. The chapter “The Nature of Gothic” from the second volume — a critique of the division of labour and industrial capitalism — will be published by William Morris as a separate book.