22/01/2010

Throwing new light on Ruskin's Stones of Venice

Robert Hewison's new book, Ruskin on Venice, tells the story behind his writings.

Ruskin on Venice
by Robert Hewison
Yale University Press, HB, 460pp £45
4/5stars

Inevitably, Ruskin inserts himself between us and his announced subject. His books, however scrupulously researched - and Stones of Venice suffers from his scrupulosity, as Robert Hewison persuasively shows - are wayward expressions of an individual temperament. They are as much about the personality of the writer as they are about the cities, paintings and buildings referred to in their titles. Hewison takes issue with the interpretations that make Ruskin's Venice a mythologised projection of the writer's self, but for me this argument seems scholastic or technical: the beauty of Ruskin's Venice is its lopsidedness and extreme eccentricity; like places in Proust, its contours are those of a particular self.
 
I am grateful to Hewison for sending me back to Ruskin's late writings about Venice, the Guide to the Principal Pictures in the Academy and St Mark's Rest. It is impossible to remember for very long how weird these two little books are. Their orders make powerful subjective sense, but they are so deeply illogical, oddly proportioned and neglectful of their putative subjects that they make the most radical modernist works look hidebound and predictable by comparison. Ruskin the modernist! Formally, as a fabricator of prose structures, he is just that. But along with this unhinged attitude to literary and psychological space goes a hatred of almost every feature of modern life.
 
Ruskin's prose is powered to a surprising degree by anger and loathing. These negative emotions are energising and life-conferring most of the time in his writing. It comes naturally to him to set what he loves off against its contrary. Of course he usually introduces them the other way round, making the anathema a preface to enthusiastic advocacy.
 
Ruskin on Venice is revelatory about Ruskin's working method, on how he went about collecting the materials he turned into Stones of Venice. So Hewison tells you a great deal about the two winters, 1849-50 and 1851-52 in which the work was mainly done, including vital detail about Ruskin's close physical examination of the remains, climbing on ladders to see the wall tombs in Zanipolo or uncovering forgotten remnants of window tracery in the Doge's Palace.
 
Hewison has also put me onto an amazing website sponsored by the University of Lancaster (www.lancs.ac.uk/depts/ruskinlib/eSoV/notes/toplevel.html), where scans of the entire series of Ruskin's Venice notebooks, along with digital transcriptions and plentiful commentary, can be viewed. Because of Ruskin's special identification with his subject, which amounts to a kind of interfusion with it or transubstantiation into it, these relics of his most sustained attachment generate something like idolatry in the susceptible viewer.
 
The second success of this book is the narrative it weaves of Ruskin's later visits, after the 17-year hiatus that followed Stones of Venice. Hewison's account of the crucial visit of 1876-7 recreates the varied texture of these days full of drawing, museum visits, walking significant routes and hallucinating a personal transformation spurred on by sprigs of herbs trying to tell him something and visits of saints, maidens and demons to his bedroom, a whole sequence of ecstasies and torments that are thrilling and excruciating simply to hear about and that drive him to the edge of madness.
 
From this point onward the story horribly darkens, as if Ruskin is doomed to live out the melodramatic pattern he finds in the history of Venice to the irrevocable end. Following him down this path makes one more tolerant of all those doom-laden sentences lamenting the end of the city he cares about.
 
The book's final success relates an aftermath, the limited victory that Ruskin and his followers have later in the century, converting the authorities to a gentler, more scrupulous kind of restoration of historic buildings. Hewison argues that the fight over the facade of St Mark's established the current orthodoxy about how to preserve crumbling monuments, respecting their physical presence in the full Ruskinian sense of the word.
 
by Robert Harbison, published on http://www.bdonline.co.uk