Tate Britain | Past Exhibitions | Ruskin, Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites

Room 4
Venice and the Nature of Gothic
This magnificently human art

In 1892 William Morris published a special edition of the central chapter of Ruskin's great work, The Stones of Venice. Morris said of the book, 'It is one of the most important things written by the author and in future days will be considered as one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century.' Morris saw that Ruskin's criticism of art and architecture, and of how it was made, inevitably led to criticism of the society that made it. The rise and fall of Venice demonstrated Ruskin's case.

This room shows Ruskin's engagement with Gothic architecture from his early, innocent enjoyment of its picturesque decay (no.66), through his increasingly serious study of its history (nos.70,73). He investigated Venetian architecture in his notebooks and analytical drawings (nos.92- 100). Venice was his textbook, and when contemporary architects sought to renew their art through the Gothic Revival, Ruskin stepped in to assert the values of his ideal city. Not just artists, but every worker, could be free within a just society, of which Venice was his model. These beliefs found a practical expression in the design of a new building, the Oxford Museum (nos.89,90,91), which brought science and art, God and nature, together.

The North-West Angle of the Facade of St Mark's, Venice

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