Architectural Study

1834–1900 · Wirkungsort

Great Britain

1843

In defence of Turner: the first volume of “Modern Painters”

The first volume of “Modern Painters” — an answer to Turner's critics — is published by Smith, Elder & Co. under the name “A Graduate of Oxford”; Ruskin controversially argues that modern landscape painters, above all Turner, surpass “Old Masters” such as Gaspard Dughet, Claude and Salvator Rosa in “truth to nature”, moral as well as material. Reviews are mixed, but Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell are impressed, and the book cements Ruskin's relationship with Turner.

1845

“Venice is lost to me”: restoration is destruction

Alarmed by the combined effects of decay and modernisation on the city, Ruskin writes that Venice is lost to him, and becomes convinced that architectural restoration is destruction and that the only true and faithful action is preservation and conservation.

1845

First journey without his parents

At 26 Ruskin travels without his parents for the first time to study medieval art and architecture in France, Switzerland and above all Italy: in Lucca he sees the tomb of Ilaria del Carretto by Jacopo della Quercia, which he considers the finest example of Christian sculpture; he draws inspiration from the Campo Santo in Pisa, is especially struck by Fra Angelico and Giotto in Florence, and in Venice by the mosaics of St Mark's and Tintoretto's paintings in the Scuola di San Rocco.

10. April 1848

Married: Effie Gray

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.