FINE ARTS.

RUSKIN'S STONES OF VENICE.*

FROM "The Foundations," which gave a name to the first volume of the " Stones of Venice," we pass in this to "The Sea-Stories,"—a title to which, as not being peculiarly appropriate in its literal architectural sense, we presume some abstract meaning is to be attached. A third volume, already in the press and announced for October, is to "embrace the early, the Roman, and the grotesque Renaissance," with a variety of matter of detail. In the present one the notices of the Byzantine and Gothic monuments are exhausted. Mr. Ruskin cannot do otherwise than add • The Stones of Venice. Volume the Second : the Sea-Stories. By John Ruskin, Author of " The Seven Lamps of Architecture," Sec. With Illustrations drawn by the Author. Published by Smith, Elder, and Co. by this second instalment of his important labours to his reputation as a vigorous and original critic, a high-toned man, and a writer of the first order. His exposition continues lucid, his eloquence earnest and digni- fied, with flashes of passion and stings of sarcasm ; his description is pic- torial, and highly wrought to a degree perhaps even more marked than before. In matter this volume is of greater general interest than the first. There, the necessity of establishing the "foundations," or first principles of construction, though lightened and made actually entertaining by plainness of statement and charm of style, could not be attractive to the majority of readers : here we have enough breadth of generalization to keep the attention fixed to a few leading points, but combined with constant change of the immediate object and variety of illustration. The manner is as bold and decided as ever, as strong in the conviction of the writer's principles, and as unflinching in the face of precedent and convention ; but it is somewhat less galling to opponents. The dogmatism, or statement of opinion as fact, while equally great, seems not so much to belong to the writer's own personality, and is more graceful in proportion. But Mr. Ruskin never sinks the teacher in the inquirer. Though not ashamed to confess himself at a loss when be feels so on points of detail, where he has made up his mind he has closed the discussion for his reader as well; and his " now observe," a favourite and characteristic expression, is final. We do not object to this : it is the necessary temper of a reformer ; and we believe Mr. Ruskin to be a true reformer, and one much needed. His love of artistic truth and reference of all questions to the canons of use, significance, and beauty, entitle him to be heard with the respect and hailed with the cordiality which, spite of the flutter he causes among the starched respectabilities, have been liberally accorded him. In none of his works are there more of those divings after essential principles— daring, new—which bring up what may at first seem a paradox, but en- forced with such vigour of analysis and richness of illustration, and based, above all, on such just moral ideas, that the sympathies and the reason of the best class of readers are convinced, and the objections of the technical talked down, if but for the moment. And it is not to be forgotten that Mr. Ruskin's views of art always have a bearing on morals—on the spiritual condition which produces the work, and which it produces. lie sees the man through the stone.

As we have already said, the Byzantine and the Gothic periods of Ve- netian architecture,—represented chiefly by their great monuments, St. Mark's and the Ducal Palace,—occupy the present volume. The laws of the Byzantine style are deduced, with the greatest ingenuity of inter- dependence, from its incrusted character ; and, hard of acceptance as any of them may seem at first sight, they are all the plain common-sense consequences of that. Their order is given as follows : 1. The plinths and cornices used for binding the armour [the incrustation of marble on the brick shell] are to be light and delicate ; 2. Science of inner con- struction is to be abandoned; 3. All shafts are to be solid ; 4. The shafts may sometimes be independent of the construction ; 5. The shafts may be of variable size ; 6. The decoration must be shallow in cutting; 7. The impression of the architecture is not to be dependent on size. The inquiry which follows this into the general question of church-deco- ration, in special reference to that of St. Mark's, is full of interest and deep original thought. We extract some passages, opening with an ad- mission candid to a degree from the mouth of a religious lover of art ; but it is only a fragment from a disquisition which in its entirety ranks among the author's most eloquent and close writings.

"The more I have examined this subject, the more dangerous I have found it to dogmatize respecting the character of the art which is likely at a given period to be most useful to the cause of religion. One great fact first meets me. I cannot answer for the experience of others, but I never yet met with a Christian whose heart was thoroughly set upon the world to come, and, so far as human judgment could pronounce, perfect and right before God, who cared about art at all. I have known several very noble Christian men who loved it intensely ; but in them there was always traceable some entanglement of the thoughts with the matters of this world, causing them to fall into strange distresses and doubts, and often leading them into what they them- selves would confess to be errors in understanding, or even failures in duty. I do not say that these men may not, many of them, be in very deed nobler

than those whose conduct is more consistent : they may be more tender in the tone of all their feelings, and farther-sighted in soul, and for that very

reason exposed to greater trials and fears, than those whose hardier frame and naturally narrower vision enable them with less effort to give their hands to God and walk with Him. But still, the general fact is indeed so, that I

have never known a man who seemed altogether right and calm in faith,

who seriously cared about art ; and, when casually moved by it, it is quite impossible to say beforehand by what class of art this impression will on such men be made. Very often it is by a theatrical commonplace, more frequently still by false sentiment. I believe that the four painters who have had, and still have, the most influence, such as it is, on the ordinary Protestant Chris- tian mind, are Carlo Doki, Guercino, Benjamin West, and John Martin. Raphael, much as he is talked about, is, I believe, in very fact rarely looked at by religious people ; much less his master, or any of the truly great reli- gious men of old. But a smooth Magdalen of Carlo Dolci with a tear on each cheek, or a Guercino Christ or St. John, or a Scripture illustration of West's, or a black cloud with a flash of lightning in it of Martin's, rarely fails of being verily, often deeply, felt for the time.

"There are indeed many very evident reasons for this ; the chief one being, that, as all truly great religious painters have been hearty Romanists,

there are none of their works which do not embody, in some portions of them, definitely Romanist doctrines. The Protestant mind is instantly struck by these, and offended by them, so as to be incapable of entering, or at least rendered indisposed to enter, farther into the heart of the work, or to

the discovering those deeper characters of it which are not Romanist but Christian, in the everlasting sense and power of Christianity. Thus, most Protestants entering for the first time a Paradise of Angelico, would be ir-

revocably offended by finding that the first person the painter wished them to speak to was St. Dominic ; and would retire from such a heaven as speedily as possible,—not giving themselves time to discover, that whether dressed in black or white or grey, and by whatever name in the calendar they might be called, the figures that filled that Angelico heaven were indeed more saintly and pure, and full of love in every feature, than any that the hu-

man hand ever traced before or since. And thus Protestantisin, having fool- ishly sought for the little help it requires at the hand of painting from the

men who embodied no Catholic doctrine, has been reduced to receive it from those who believed neither Catholicism nor Protestantism, but who read the Bible in search of the picturesque. We thus refuse to regard the painters

who passed their lives in prayer, but are perfectly ready to be taught by those who spent them in debauchery. There is perhaps no more popular Protestant picture than Salvator's Witch of Ender' ; of which the subject was chosen by the painter simply because, under the names of Saul and the Sorceress, he could paint a captain of banditti aLd a Neapolitan hag.

"The fact seems to be, that strength of religious feeling is capable of sup- plying for itself whatever is wanting in the rudest suggestions of art, and will either, on the one hand, purify what is coarse into inoffensiveness, or on the other, raise what is feeble into impressiveness."

In pursuing the subject of the first Venetian architecture, the Byzan- tine, Mr. Ruskin touches on its affection for splendid colour ; and he does so in a manner that should earn him the gratitude of all painters. Many, assuredly, will recognize what he says as intensely and profoundly true. Its evidences are open to all; and yet we are not aware that this truth had ever before been clearly and resolutely enunciated. "The principal circumstance which marks the seriousness of the early Venetian mind is perhaps the last in which the reader would suppose it was traceable ; that love of 'bright and pure colour which, in a modified form, was afterwards the root of all the triumph of the Venetian schools of painting, but which in its utmost simplicity was characteristic of the Byzantine period only ; and of which, therefore in the close of our review of that period, it will be well that we should truly estimate the significance. The fact is we none of us enough appreciate the nobleness and sacredness of colour. Nothing is more common than to hear it spoken of as a subordinate beauty, —nay, even as the mere source of a sensual pleasure ; and we might almost believe that we were daily among men who

Could strip, for aught the prospect yields To them, their verdure from the fields, And take the radiance from the clouds With which the sun his setting shrouds.'

But it is not so. Such expressions are used for the most part in thought- lessness; and if the speakers would only take the pains to imagine what the world and their own existence would become if the blue were taken from the sky, and the gold from the sunshine and the verdure from the leaves, and the crimson from the blood which is the life of man, the flush from the cheek, the darkness from the eye, the radiance from the hair,—if they could but see for an instant white human creatures living in a white world, they would soon feel what they owe to colour. The fact is, that, of all God's gifts to the sight of man, colour is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn. We speak rashly of gay colour and sad colour, for colour can- not at once be good and gay. All good colour is in some degree pensive, the loveliest is melancholy ; and the purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.

"I know that this will sound strange in many ears and will be especially startling to those who have considered the subject chiefly with reference to painting; for the great Venetian schools of colour are not usually under- stood to be either pure or pensive, and the idea of its preeminence is associated in nearly every mind with the coarseness of Rubens and the sensualities of Correggio and Titian. But a more comprehensive view of art will soon cor- rect this impression. It will be discovered, in the first place, that the more faithful and earnest the religion of the painter, the more pure and prevalent is the system of his colour. It will be found, in the second place, that where colour become a primal intention with a painter otherwise mean or sensual, it instantly elevates him, and becomes the one sacred and saving element in his work. The very depths of the stoop to which the Venetian painters and Rubens sometimes condescend, is a consequence of their feeling confidence in the power of their colour to keep them from falling. They hold on by it, as a chain let down from heaven, with one hand, though they may sometimes seem to gather dust and ashes with the other. And, in the last place, it will be found that so surely as a painter is irreligious, thought- less, or obscene in disposition, so surely is his colouring cold, gloomy, and valueless. The opposite poles of art in this respect are Era Angelico and Salvator Rosa • of whom the one was a man who smiled seldom, wept often, prayed constantly, and never harboured an impure thought. His pictures are simply so many pieces of jewellery, the colours of the drapery being per- fectly pure, as various as those of a painted window, chastened only by pale- ness, and relieved upon a gold ground. Salvator was a dissipated jester and satirist, a man who spent his life in masquing and revelry. But his pictures are full of horror, and their colour is for the most part gloomy grey. Truly it would seem as if art had so much of eternity in it, that it must take its dye from the close rather than the course of life : In such laughter the heart of man is sorrowful, and the end of that mirth is heaviness.'

"These are no singular instances. I know no law more severely without exception than this of the connexion of pure colour with profound and noble thought. The late Flemish pictures, shallow in conception and obscene in subject, are always sober in colour. But the early religious painting of the Flemings is as brilliant in hue as it is holy in thought. The Bellinis, Francias, Peruginos, painted in crimson and blue and gold ; the Caraceis, Guides, and Rembrandta, in brown and grey. The builders of our great cathedrals veiled their casements and wrapped their pillars with one robe of purple splendour. The builders of the luxurious Renaissance left their palaces filled only with cold white light, and in the paleness of their native stone.

"And observe, farther, how in the Oriental mind a peculiar seriousness is associated with this attribute of the love of colour ; a seriousness rising out of repose, and out of the depth and breadth of the imagination, as contrasted with the activity and consequent capability of surprise and of laughter cha- racteristic of the Western mind : as a man on a journey must look to his steps always, and view things narrowly and quickly ; while one at rest may command a wider view, though an unchanging one, from which the pleasure he receives must be one of contemplation rather than of amusement or sur- prise. Wherever the pure Oriental spirit manifests itself definitely, I be- lieve its work is serious ; and the meeting of the influences of the Eastern and Western races is perhaps marked in Europe more by the dying away of the grotesque laughter of the Goth than by any other sign." The second division of the volume—that on the Gothic period—opens with a masterly and exhaustive analysis of the nature of Gothic ; which Mr. Ruskin sums up as "savageness, changefulness, naturalism gro- tesqueness, rigidity, and redundance." This "rigidity" is afterwards defined as "not merely stable, but active rigidity ; the peculiar energy which gives tension to movement and stiffness to resistance." The whole chapter abounds in subtilties of criticism and speculation, leading to im- portant social considerations of our own day. Here occurs one of the most notable of those axioms which, in seeming paradox, contain intimate truth,—" Neither architecture nor any other noble work of man can be good unless it be imperfect." Mr. Ruskin leaves nothing to be desired in his development of the constituents of Gothic architecture, but he does not give any definition of the expression of a Gothic building as a whole. Perhaps it may be called the expression of the etruggle after nobleness in an active life sympathizing with what is robust and natural, and the pleasure in that struggle. In his last chapter, the author investigates the history of the Ducal Palace ; and comes to the conclusion that it afforded the first example of the perfected Gothic style in Venice, and remained for many years the model of all buildings of the same school. We believe that Mr. Ruskin is invariably fair, so far as intention goes, to the objects of both his admiration and his abhorrence ; but, like other men, he is not free from bias. We will take two examples. His fervent Protestantism has been before exemplified ; it appears conspicuously, but tempered in expression, here. In a note on the "proper sense of the word Idolatry," he is peculiarly guarded to make every reasonable al- lowance; yet he discovers " Mariolairy " in the church at Murano in a more positive sense than the facts appear to warrant. The following is the inscription on the dome- " Quos Eva contrivit pia Virgo Maria redemit : Raise cuncti laudent qui Christi munere gaudent."

To which he subjoins, in translation and comment—

"Whom Eve destroyed the pious Virgin Mary redeemed : All praise her who rejoice in the grace of Christ. The whole edifice is therefore simply a temple to the Virgin : to her is as- cribed the fact of the redemption, and to her its praise." We submit that a more literal translation of the second line would be- " Let all who enjoy Christ's Gift praise her"; and that, inasmuch as Christ's gift must be redemption, the ascribing of that redemption to the Virgin in the first line can only be understood in an elliptical sense, as implying that she was the means.appointed for the Saviour's advent.

Our second example has reference to the not unjustly denounced Re- naissance. The three angle-sculptures of the Ducal Palace are the Fall of Man and the Drunkenness of Noah, in the Gothic portion, and the Judgment of Solomon, in the Renaissance portion. Mr. Ruskin defines the chief sentiment of Gothic work to be "the frank confession of its own weakness,"—of Renaissance work, the "firm confidence in its own wis- dom "; and he appeals to these sculptures in proof. We can divine, even without the development which it is to receive in the third volume, that this second definition is, in the main, accurate. But, without taking into consideration the fact that the Renaissance subject here chosen is one pe- culiarly appropriate to a building of state counsel and just judgment, we must say that, in this particular instance, we do not think there is any suggestion of confidence in human wisdom. Solomon's wisdom was the immediate and special gift of God, miraculously communicated ; and we cannot but infer that it was evinced, on the occasion portrayed, under the fullest sense of responsibility and delegation.

The plates to this volume, unlike those to the first, are all in line- engraving, most minutely designed and delicately executed ; and they familiarize us with some of the most lovely and profuse architectural in- ventions in the world. We should prefer, however, some sprinkling of etchings. The drawings of actual acanthus-leaves, for instance, in Plate II, would in that style lose the hardness which attaches to them in this.