Clive Wilmer

A VENETIAN EXCURSION
John Ruskin in Verona

On his annual visits to Italy, which began during his teens, John Ruskin was influenced by
the Romantic vision of Venice. Despite this, he soon looked for critical objectivity and
eventually dismissed his Venetian studies as “bye-work” He turned instead to nearby Verona,
which had already featured in The Stones of Venice (1851 –53). The city’s
Romanesque and Gothic churches, its funeral monuments and its fortifications combine
southern and northern elements, which blend well with the drama of its setting. This essay
argues that Ruskin was attracted to the masculine stability of Veronese fortifications in
contrast to the feminine and seductive charms of Venice, and that these qualities appealed to
the Gothic Revival with its dream of chivalry and idealised imperialism. The interweaving
of these matters with the geology and history of the region is the subject of Ruskin’s
marvelous lecture, “Verona and its Rivers.”

Keywords Ruskin; Venice; Verona; Victorian; Romantic; Gothic; Lombard/ic

In a letter of 1859 John Ruskin recalled the sheer hard labor involved in researching The
Stones of Venice, the three-volume study of Venetian architecture he published in 1851
and 1853. He was looking back some ten years at a feeling familiar to most scholars:
that the effort required for carrying out such an enterprise will destroy the enthusiasm
that first inspired it. But Ruskin’s enthusiasm for Italy in general and Venice in
particular was not of a kind that is easily extinguished and every so often, he told his
correspondent, he had recovered the old passion:

There was only one place in Venice which I never lost the feeling of joy in – at
least the pleasure that is better than joy; and that was just halfway between the end
of the Giudecca and St George of the Seaweed, at sunset. If you tie your boat to
one of the posts there, you can see the Euganeans, when the sun goes down, and all
the Alps and Venice behind you in the rosy sunlight: there is no other spot so
beautiful (Ruskin, Works vol. ix, p. xxviii).1

It seems to me that this passage is as much about memory as about the excitement
of a specific moment. Ruskin is recovering the childhood rapture of his first foreign
journeys with his parents. As his description suggests, the experience of mountains or
hills and the experience of Venice were one experience. They are yoked together by the
water and the sunset to create an ideogram of the boy’s ecstasy: the sort of complex of
images that sometimes provided the subjects of Turner watercolors. If you wanted to
be negative about Ruskin, you could describe him as a writer who could never stick to

Prose Studies, Vol. 31, No. 2 August 2009, pp. 93-101

ISSN 0144-0357 print/ISSN 1743-9426 online q 2009 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/01440350903323488
94 PROSE STUDIES

his subject, yet this – as those who admire him can easily see – is precisely his greatest
virtue. The digressions are never irrelevant; to show the connections between matters
apparently disparate, it might be argued, is the chief motive of all Ruskin’s writing. The
ideogram in question shows the unity of his thought. He did not love Venice because it
had beautiful buildings in it. He loved it because those buildings were built in the sea,
because the way they are built and the materials they are made of reveal an awareness of
natural context in the builders, and the nearness of the hills and the mountains is part of
that context too.
And yet, as he was shocked to discover in his reading of past literature, there was
not much evidence that the presence of the sea in Venice meant much to the writers he
admired. “Sir Philip Sidney goes to Venice,” he notes in his autobiography Praeterita,
“and seems unconscious of the fact that it is in the sea at all” (Works xxxv. 294).
Elsewhere in that book he recognizes that the Romantic valuation of natural sublimity
was more or less without precedent:

It is not possible to imagine, in any time of the world, a more blessed entrance into
life, for a child of such a temperament as mine. True, the temperament belonged
to the age: a very few years, – within the hundred, – before that, no child could
have been born to care for mountains, or for the men that lived among them, in
that way. Till Rousseau’s time, there had been no “sentimental” love of nature; and
till Scott’s, no such apprehensive love of “all sorts and conditions of men”,2 not in
the soul merely, but in the flesh (Works xxxv. 115).

As this indicates, far from being digressive, Ruskin’s impulse – and it is, as he
acknowledges, a Romantic impulse – is to bring together things that might have been
thought disparate: art, nature and a social conscience. And it was much the same
Romantic impulse that gave Venice its peculiar value for him: made a visit to the city a
composite experience of a kind that any modern tourist can recognize. His first
childhood experience of the city is captured in Praeterita:

My Venice, like Turner’s, had been chiefly created for us by Byron; but for me,
there was still the pure childish passion of pleasure in seeing boats float in clear
water. The beginning of everything was in seeing the gondola-beak come actually
inside the door at Danieli’s, when the tide was up, and the water two feet deep at
the foot of the stairs; and then, all along the canal sides, actual marble walls rising
out of the salt sea, with hosts of little brown crabs on them, and Titians inside . . . I
find a sentence in my diary of 8th May . . . “Thank God I am here; it is the Paradise
of cities” (Works xxxv. 296).

But though this is undeniably Romantic, it is also observant in a particularizing

manner that is wholly foreign to Byron and largely so to Turner; and if Venice is
paradise, it is so because of the contiguity of Titian’s paintings with God’s creatures the
crabs, of the gondola with the palace turned hotel.
It is no accident that Ruskin called his book The Stones of Venice, for it is as much a
book about stone as about building. In a famous sentence from the chapter “On the
Nature of Gothic” he writes of the “look of mountain brotherhood between the
cathedral and the Alp” (Works x. 188). The author whose earliest publications, at the age
 JOHN RUSKIN IN VERONA 95

of 15, were essays on geology always sought to bind art and nature closer together
than they had been in the pre-Romantic era.3 In his architectural drawings, he is often
as interested in the geological character of the stone as in the design. A prime example
might be the celebrated drawing of marble cladding on the Baptistery in Florence,4 and
occasionally in his drawings from nature his sense of geological structure is informed by
his understanding of architecture.5
For most of his life, Ruskin’s joint passions were represented for him by two
places: Chamonix and Venice. When he declares in his diaries (quoted in Praeterita) that
Venice is “the Paradise of cities,” he adds: “This, and Chamouni, are my two homes of
earth” (Works xxxv. 296). His first visit to Chamonix was with his parents in 1833, and,
two years later, a second visit was followed by his first sight of Venice. The thrill of
those early visits, enhanced for him in art and poetry by the work of Turner and Byron,
was something he never forgot and often sought to relive. Or never quite forgot, for in
Praeterita, composed between 1885 and 1889, he significantly down-values one of his
two homes:

I must here . . . tell the general reader that there have been, in sum, three centres
of my life’s work: Rouen, Geneva, and Pisa. All that I did at Venice was bye-work,
because her history had been falsely written before, and not even by any of her
own people understood . . . (Works xxxv. 156).

By “centres” in this passage he means cities, so Geneva may be taken to cover

Chamonix and the whole Alpine experience, but Venice is specifically excluded and
even disparaged. The reason for this, I believe – and I am not the first critic to say so6 –
is that he came to feel that Venice had betrayed him, or tempted him away from stabler
and more trustworthy attachments.
As the names of Turner and Byron suggest, Ruskin’s love of Venice had been in its
origin a Romantic passion: a matter of atmosphere and association. But he was not of a
temperament that could be satisfied with that. He wanted to understand why he was
moved and, more especially, why it was not the landmarks of the Grand Tourists that
stirred him, the monuments of the Renaissance and Baroque, but the older buildings,
Byzantine and Gothic; not the much painted and visited San Giorgio Maggiore but the
desolation of remote Torcello. The need to understand his emotions necessitated some
colder objectivities, like those of the natural historians and geologists he was learning
from as well. As we gather from his arguments with his father, Ruskin could be as
resistant to the Romantic as he was at other times prone to it. The “antiquarianism” of
The Stones of Venice, the almost scientific analysis of specimens and their arrangement in
evolutionary charts – these and the plainer prose style used in much of the book were
not to his father’s taste. But Ruskin wanted to know how the city had come about and
why it was beautiful. Mere indulgence in its magic was not enough.7
Venice, of course, is everywhere in his writings, but he made two major attempts
to grasp the secret of her beauty. The first was in The Stones of Venice (1851 –53) and in
his work on Tintoretto, notably in Modern Painters 2 (1846). The second was in the
1870s, when he wrote that strangely discouraging book St Mark’s Rest (1877) and a very
distinguished, if sadly neglected fragment, Guide to the Principal Pictures in the Academy of
Fine Arts, Venice (1877). By this time, as certain letters from Fors Clavigera suggest,8
he had begun to feel betrayed. The Stones had already looked at the fall of Venice as the
96 PROSE STUDIES

just reward for apostasy. By the 1870s, her continuing decay, the greed of her citizens,
the assaults on her monuments by so-called restorers – all these things had made her a
symbol of the evils of modernity, the parallel he had drawn with modern England in the
opening sentence of The Stones becoming all too painfully significant. Many of the
implications of that parallel came to be acted out in the art and design of Ruskin’s
lifetime: the impact of Tintoretto (in Ruskin’s account of him at any rate) on Pre-
Raphaelite painting and the schools it influenced, the role of Venetian polychromy in
the High Gothic Revival. Equally important in this regard, I want to suggest, is the role
of that Venetian province, the city of Verona.
Much has been written, especially of late, about Ruskin’s feeling for the medieval
city as for an innocent virgin bride, as also about the obvious extension of that analogy,
the city of pleasure as decadent seductress or even whore.9 To the attractions of the
latter he was not entirely immune himself. Despite what he has to say about the stern
virtues of Torcello, there is from the outset something feline, sensual and orientally
feminine in the city he adored. It is no accident that in his description of San Marco in
The Stones of Venice II, he writes of “marbles, that half refuse and half yield to the
sunshine, Cleopatra-like, ‘their bluest veins to kiss’” (Works x. 83).10 At any rate,
Venice is La Serenissima. When Ruskin felt betrayed by her, his imagination figured her
as a woman – an unfaithful wife or mistress.
It is in this context, I want to argue, that we must understand Ruskin’s parallel love
for Verona, a city which crops up frequently in his writings, the earliest being “The
moon is up, the heaven is bright” a poem about the Roman Arena there, composed at
the age of 16 (Works ii. 439). It is no accident that Verona is often mentioned in The
Stones of Venice itself, the two cities being physically near and their artistic traditions
related. It is possible to think of this inland city as one of Ruskin’s significant
digressions. It was, indeed, the object of excursions: on most of Ruskin’s trips to
Venice, he usually took time off to visit Verona, and one suspects that his fondness for
the place enabled him to relax emotionally. He needed, that is to say, relief from
his grand passion. Verona contained, moreover, – as he wrote in A Joy for Ever
(1857) –“the most singular concentration of art-teaching and art-treasure” he knew of
(Works xvi. 66) and, as he told Norton in a letter of the same year, “it is my dearest place
in Italy” (Works xxxvi. 262). That concentration, though distinctive, is not as
idiosyncratic as Venetian art, but, as he wrote in A Joy for Ever, represents the culture of
the whole peninsula:

[I]t contains perfect examples of the great twelfth-century Lombardic architecture,

which was the root of all the mediaeval art of Italy, without which no Giottos, no
Angelicos, no Raphaels would have been possible: it contains that architecture, not
in rude forms, but in the most perfect and loveliest types it ever attained –
contains those, not in ruins, nor in altered and hardly decipherable fragments, but
in churches perfect from porch to apse, with all their carving fresh, their pillars
firm, their joints unloosened. Besides these, it includes examples of the great
thirteenth and fourteenth century Gothic of Italy, not merely perfect, but
elsewhere unrivalled (Works xvi. 66).

Ruskin here has particularly in mind five perfect medieval churches: the Duomo,
San Zeno, Sant’Anastasia and San Fermo – and the Gothic tombs of Count Guglielmo
 JOHN RUSKIN IN VERONA 97

Castelbarco and the Lords of Verona, the Scaligeri. Such concentration almost balances
the superfluity of Venetian riches.
Yet where Venice, like Shakespeare’s England, has the sea to serve it “in the office
of a wall,”11 thus sparing its palaces the need for fortifications and facilitating the
uniqueness of Venetian architecture, much of the beauty and historical importance of
Verona is to be found in its battlements, turrets and crenellations – as Ruskin notices
in the lecture “Verona, and its Rivers” (1870), when he discusses the importance of Can
Grande della Scala, the greatest of the Scaligeri, who planned the city’s magnificent
medieval walls, and, without naming him, of Michele Sanmicheli, the Renaissance
architect who made the city proof against modern cannonry.12 Ruskin found in Verona,
I want to suggest, a number of masculine virtues. It is not that Verona is not feminine –
one can think of many ways in which it is – but that it also has distinctively masculine
qualities, and precisely those we associate with trust and security. It is hugely important
for Ruskin that it was Verona, with Can Grande at its helm, that protected Dante from
his enemies and provided him with the peace to write his poem – Dante, whom he
calls in The Stones of Venice III “the central man of all the world” (Works xi. 187).
These qualities were in time to supplant, for Ruskin, the seductive charms of
Venice. Later on in Praeterita he has second thoughts about the “centres of my life’s
work”:

I must not yet say more of Verona, than that, though truly Rouen, Geneva, and
Pisa have been the centres of thought and teaching to me, Verona has given the
colouring of all they taught. She has virtually represented the fate and the beauty of
Italy to me; and whatever concerning Italy I have felt, or been able with any charm
or force to say, has been dealt with more deeply, and said more earnestly, for her
sake (Works xxxv. 371).

Here is the feminine Verona and she is loved in part for her constancy, a virtue not
unrelated to masculine trust. Notice also the word “colouring,” not a word that Ruskin
would ever have used lightly, especially not in the birthplace of Paolo Veronese, the
city famous for what (in “Verona, and its Rivers”), he calls its “peach-blossom marble”
(Works xix. 432). “Colour,” he says in Modern Painters V, “is . . . the type of Love” (Works
vii. 419).
What we now need are examples. Perhaps the finest building in this city of fine
buildings is the basilica of San Zeno, one of the five churches adduced by Ruskin in The
Stones of Venice II as exemplifying Lombardic Romanesque (Works x. 25). (The others are
Sant’ Ambrogio in Milan, San Frediano in Lucca, San Michele in Pavia, San Miniato al
Monte in Florence and the Baptistery in Parma.) In the crypt of San Zeno is a pair of
slim marble shafts with concave capitals, one column straight, the other twisted. They
are described in the chapter called “The Cornice and Capital” in The Stones of Venice.
There is also, engraved from a drawing by Ruskin, an illustrative plate, which shows,
he says,

its singularly bold and keen execution [which gives] the impression of its rather
having been cloven into its form by the sweeps of a sword, than by the dull travail
of a chisel. Its workman was proud of it, as well he might be: he has written
his name upon its front (I would that more of his fellows had been as kindly vain),
98 PROSE STUDIES

and the goodly stone proclaims for ever, ADAMINUS DE SANCTO GIORGIO
ME FECIT (Works ix. 379).

It is now virtually proven that Ezra Pound was led by Ruskin’s prose to precisely
these columns, which figure in Canto 45, his incantation against usury: “With usura . . .
/Came no church of cut stone signed: Adamo me fecit”. In Canto XI of Dante’s Inferno,
the lending of money at interest is denounced as “violence against nature,” (lines 46–
111), a judgment passionately endorsed by Ruskin.13 For Ruskin as for Pound it would
have been impossible to achieve the stability and grace of Veronese architecture in a
society given over to competition.
The non-usurious period in which the six Lombardic churches were constructed –
rather a long one, as it happens – is described in “Verona and its Rivers” as a period “of
Christianization”:

one of savage but noble life gradually subjected to law. It is the forming of men,
not out of clay, but out of splendid wild beasts, often as gentle as they are wild, but
of unconquered animal nature. And all art of that date, in all countries, including
our own Norman especially, is, in the inner heart of it, the subjection of savage or
terrible, or wilful and wandering life, to a dominant law. It is government and
conquest of fearful dreams. There is in it as yet no germ of true hope; only the
conquest of evil, and the waking from darkness and terror (Works xix. 435 –6).

This passage evokes both “the glacier torrent” of the Germanic invaders imagined in
the first chapter of The Stones of Venice I (Works ix. 38), as well as the compliant or
subjected animals that in sculptured form support the porticos of such buildings as San
Zeno and the Duomo. Descriptions of the barbarian hordes in much Victorian writing –
in Thomas Carlyle, Charles Kingsley and William Morris, for instance – are often
sympathetic in this way. They are indebted to the idealization of the Teutonic tribes in
the Germania of Tacitus and represent – sometimes with racist implications – the pride
felt by northern peoples in belonging to nations more noted for energy than for the
creative refinements of the south. Ruskin, of course, had plenty of time for creative
refinement, but he liked it mixed with the harsher masculine virtues, and it is no
accident that he should connect the Lombards with the Norman invaders of England.
This subdued barbarism, the condition of serviceable griffons and lions, is comforting to
Ruskin as Venice never can be.
There is evidence in Verona – in the sculptural decoration of San Zeno, for
instance – of a Teutonic influence that continued quite late into the Middle Ages. I am
not suggesting that Ruskin makes much of this, but there can be little doubt that
through his influence the Gothic style of Verona, whose sturdiness and vivid coloration
clearly grow from the Lombard work that precedes it, played a major role in the
English Gothic Revival. It is as if the English architects, looking for southern color,
preferred this more northern use of it to anything that could be found in the “oriental”
styles that came to them by way of Venice, their polychromatic brick- and tile-work
doing service for different hues of encrusted marble. Because such Veronese motifs are
features of suburban houses and minor public buildings, rather than major churches or
city halls, they tend to be overlooked. But to take just one example: Plate XIX from
The Stones of Venice I, “Archivolt Decoration. At Verona,” which depicts an arch from
 JOHN RUSKIN IN VERONA 99

the Gothic church of San Fermo Maggiore, is plainly the model – particularly as
engraved for illustration – for much of the detail of High Victorian architecture
(Works, ix. 390). There was perhaps something in imperial Britain with its revived
notions of chivalry that responded to Veronese masculinity.14
The Gothic of the city grows very naturally out of the Lombardic style. It belongs,
in Ruskin’s words, to “Dante’s time,” “in which you have the highest development of
Italian characters and chivalry with an entirely believed Christian religion. You get
therefore joy, and courtesy, and hope, and a lovely peace in death” (Works xix 437).
Dante’s Verona is Can Grande’s, of course, and the period is especially focused for
Ruskin in the city’s defensive works – the bridge and fortifications – and in its noble
tradition of tomb sculpture. The arch of the Castelbarco tomb outside the church of
Sant’Anastasia – “as far as I know or am able to judge, the most perfect Gothic
sepulchral arch in the world” (Works x. 175) – occasions one of the subtlest pieces of
architectural criticism in the whole of The Stones of Venice (the chapter on arch
masonry), and the account of Can Grande’s tomb in the same book, as it seems to me,
gets to the heart of Ruskin’s idea of art. He draws attention to the relative modesty of
the figure in effigy and the inconspicuousness of the tomb itself – by implied
comparison with the later tomb of Can Signorio. He then reminds us how, almost as an
afterthought, we look up at the canopy above the tomb and discover the fabulous
equestrian statue of the dead man “seen, as by memory, far away, diminished in the
brightness of the sky.” It is, he reminds us,

the likeness of his armed youth, stately, as it stood of old in the front of battle, and
meet to be thus recorded for us, that we may now be able to remember the dignity
of the frame, of which those who once looked upon it hardly remembered that it
was dust (Works xix. 431).

One of the many things Ruskin is describing here, I think, is how art is always a record
of physical life recorded in physical materials, but that in the true creative act the
spiritual foundation of life is made manifest. In art, as in life, the body expresses
the soul.
This conception is behind a fairly straightforward sentence near the beginning of
“Verona, and its Rivers.” The lecture begins with a walk that leads the reader through
the eastern gate of the city, along the fortifications and up into the mountains. From
one particular summit, Ruskin tells us,

you may see entire Verona, and all the plain between Alp and Appenine; and so if
you please, we will find a place where the rocks are mossy, and sit down, and
consider a little what this landscape of all the landscapes in the world has specially
to say to us (Works xix. 431).

What it says brings together the importance of fossils in modern geology, the
development of defensive architecture and, as a result, of civic life, the threat to that
from modern weaponry, the openness of Verona to the Germanic north and the way
the cultural centres of Italy interrelate and are subject to the currents of history,
whether in the form of invading armies or movements in the arts. We are also shown
the source of “the peach-blossom marble” that makes Verona what it is. Behind this
100 PROSE STUDIES

display of intellectual audacity is the assumption that landscapes, like books and
buildings, say things, if we take the trouble to read them. Or to put it another way: that
the physical world, man-made or natural, is informed with meaning, just as the body is
with consciousness. If we read deeply, moreover, we will see that, as in Venice, the
mountains and the city are not distinct experiences: that they are bound together in a
vast web of significance.

Notes
1. Letter to Charles Eliot Norton, quoted in the Introduction to Ruskin, Works of John
Ruskin (see References for full details). All other references to Ruskin’s writings are to
this edition and are cited numerically in the text, volume number followed by page
number. (Ruskin quotes this letter in his Introduction to the Brantwood edition of The
Stones of Venice (Travellers’ Edition.) The church he refers to is San Giorgio in Alga.
2. Ruskin’s quotation is from the ‘Collect for All Conditions of Men’ from the Anglican
Book of Common Prayer (1662).
3. In 1834, when he was 15, Ruskin contributed two articles on Alpine geology to
Loudon’s Magazine of Natural History (Works i. 191 –196).
4. The Baptistery, Florence. 1872. Watercolour, body colour and pencil. 52 £ 34.5 cm.
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
5. See, for example, Aiguille Blaitière. c.1849. Pencil, ink and watercolour.
25 £ 35.8 cm. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. In this drawing the needle-like
peak (the aiguille) and the curve of the glacier beneath it might be thought to resemble
the spire and roof of a Gothic cathedral.
6. See, for instance, Clegg, 3 –4.
7. Ibid., 100 – 2. The word ‘antiquarianism’ is quoted from Ruskin’s letters to his father.
8. For example, Letter 20, “Benediction” (Works xxvii. 334 – 49).
9. For a useful summary of the literature relevant to this matter, as well as for a sensibly
skeptical account of the metaphor’s importance, see Hewison.
10. The quotation is from Antony and Cleopatra, II. v. 29.
11. Richard II, II. i. 47.
12. Can Grande della Scala (1291 –1329) became Lord of Verona in 1311. In his day he
was the most prominent Ghibelline (or pro-imperial) ruler in Northern Italy. Can
Grande ordered the building of the elegant defensive walls of Verona and, in the same
style, the bridge known as the Ponte Scaligero. Michele Sanmicheli (1484– 1559) was
the most prominent Veronese architect of the sixteenth century; he is especially
known for his defensive works in the city.
13. Pound, 230; Dante, 1, 172 – 177. For further discussion of Ruskin, Pound and the San
Zeno capital, see Witemeyer and Wilmer.
14. For Ruskin’s views on chivalry and the imperial ideal, see Girouard, 220 – 3.

References
Clegg, Jeanne. Ruskin and Venice. London: Junction Books, 1981.
Dante. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, edited by Robert M. Durling. Vol 1: Inferno.
New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
 JOHN RUSKIN IN VERONA 101

Girouard, Mark. The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman. New Haven, CT
and London: Yale University Press, 1981.
Hewison, Robert. “Sex and the City – Death in Venice: An Argument about Ruskinian
Myth.” In Ruskin’s Struggle for Coherence: Self-Representation through Art, Place and
Society, edited by Rachel Dickinson and Keith Hanley. Newcastle-upon-Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars, 2006, 37 – 51.
Pound, Ezra. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. London: Faber, 1987.
Ruskin, John. The Works of John Ruskin (Library Edition), edited by Edward Tyas Cook and
Alexander Wedderburn. 39 vols. London: George Allen, 1903– 12.
Witemeyer, Hugh. “Ruskin and the Signed Capital in Canto 45.” Paideuma 4.1 (1975):
85– 8.
Wilmer, Clive. “Sculpture and Economics in Pound and Ruskin.” In Ruskin and the Twentieth
Century: The Modernity of Ruskinism, edited by Toni Cerutti. Vercelli: Edizioni
Mercurio, 2000, 169– 87.

Clive Wilmer, poet and critic, is a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College and a Bye-Fellow of
Fitzwilliam College, both at Cambridge, an Honorary Fellow of Anglia Ruskin University
and a Director of the Guild of St George. He edited the Penguin edition of Ruskin’s Unto
This Last and Other Writings. Address: Clive Wilmer, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge,
CB2 3HU, UK; cw291@cam.ac.uk