by Airlie Maria HeungSEMINAR PRESENTATION

• Why did Ruskin name the book “The Stones of Venice”? What is the significance and what did it imply?

• How is this book linked/similar to the Seven Lamps of Architecture?

• How are they different?• Why put the chapter St Mark’s before The

Nature of Gothic?• What is the main idea Ruskin wishes to

express?

QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT DURING THE

PRESENTATION

• The Quarry

• The Virtues of ArchitectureAct well, speak well, look well• The 6 Divisions of Architecture: Walls, piers, lintels, arches for roofing, buttresses& apertures

INTRODUCTION TO STONES OF VENICE: BOOK I

• Superimposition: Weight on lightness, lightness on weight

• Ornament: Material—Abstract lines, forms of earth (crystals), forms of water (waves), forms of fire (flames and rays), forms of air (clouds), organic forms (shells & fish), reptiles & insects, vegetation (stems and trunks), vegetation (foliage), birds, mammalian animals and Man; Treatment: distance

• The Throne• Torcello: mother and daughter widowhood—

Torcello and Venice

INTRODUCTION TO STONES OF VENICE: BOOK I , II

• History of St. Theodore, St. Mark, the Venetian gov. moved to Rialto, the Ducal Palace and finally St. Mark’s Basilica

• Byzantine architects restoration of St. Mark’s 1. Gothic school: pinnacles, upper archivolts, window traceries2. Renaissance school: Titian & Tintoret

enable imagination and lament what is destroyed (11th, 14th Gothic additions, 17th restored

mosaics)• English cathedral walk before entering Venice’s

everyday buildings

ST MARK’S INTRODUCTION

SHORT CLIP

ST MARKS SQUARE (PIAZZA SAN MARCO) WITH THE

BASILICA

• Bocca di Piazza (mouth of the square)

• chequered stones, countless arches in symmetryobedience

• multitude of pillars and white domes, part gold and opal,

• hollowed into 5 great vaulted porches ceiled with fair mosaics

• sculpture of alabaster, clear as amber delicate as ivory, of nature and angels

• Morning light Eden• Here we see the Fig-Tree Angles

with the leaves that clothed Adam & Eve

ST MARK’S SQUARE

• Cross, signs of heaven, seasons upon the earth, glittering pinnacles mixed with white arches and scarlet flowers • Greek horses blazing in their breadth of golden strength St Mark’s Lion

LAMENTS ON ST MARK’S SQUARE BEFORE

ENTERING THE BASILICA

INTERIOR OF ST. MARK’S BASILICA

• Vast cave hewn into the form of a Cross• Divided into shadowy aisles of pillars • Round the domes of the roof enters only through narrow apertures like large stars• Wanders of darkness, torches, silver lamps burning ceaselessly in the recesses• Walls covered with alabaster. One picture passing into another as in a dream• Lead always to the Cross• Confessed Incrustation

ST MARKS BASILICA

• 1. Choice either to lodge his few blocks of precious marble here and there among his masses of brick, and cut out of the sculptured fragments such new forms for observance of fixed proportions of new building

• 2. Cut the colored stones into thin pieces , of extent sufficient to face the whole surface of the walls and adopt a method of construction irregular enough to admit the insertion of fragmentary sculptures

• An architect should choose the latter to preserve noble work

LOCATION & CONTRASTS:

• Venetians as the only Europeans to have sympathized to the full with the great instinct of the Eastern racesartists from Constantinople to design mosaics of the vaults of St. Mark’s and to group the colors of the porchespalaces with porphyry & gold

• School of incrusted architecture is the only in which perfect and permanent chromatic decoration is possible (strength of the edifice to be in the brick clothed with the brightness of the marble)

COLOR

• Degree of Gothicness

• Internal elements: Fancifulness, love of variety, love of richness Mental Expression

• External form: pointed arches, vaulted roofs Material Form

THE NATURE OF GOTHIC

1. Savageness (Savageness/ Rudeness)2. Changefulness (Love of Change)3. Naturalism (Love of Nature)4. Grotesqueness (Disturbed Imagination) 5. Rigidity (Obstinacy)6. Redundance ( Generosity)

 

MORAL ELEMENTS IN THE ORDER OF IMPORTANCE TO THE BUILDING (& BUILDER):

• Contrasts the North and Southern Savageness • 1. Servile ornament enduring imperfection• 2. Constitutional ornament condemning

mass production perfection as unhumanizing, slavery

• 3. Revolutionary ornamentshould not divide the work of the thinker and the maker because it obstructs the expression and creates hostility between the two

SAVAGENESS

• Perpetual variety of every feature in the building• Enslaved perfection vs less degraded less similar parts of the building• If as in Gothic work, there is a perpetual change both in design and execution, the workman must have been altogether set free• Contrast English architecture’s love of order do not let us suppose that love of order is love of art• Cannot read a building as we read Milton and Dante and getting the same delight• Great art whether expressing itself in words, colors or stones doesn NOT say the same thing over and over again new and different things entertaining easy to copy

CHANGEFULNESS

• Necessity: in monotony • Renaissance capable of perpetual

novelty• Gothic love of variety, exhibited that

love, culminating energies• Eg sublimity in music

CHANGEFULNESS

• The love of natural objects for their own sake and to represent them frankly• workman is left free to represent what subject he chooses, he must look into nature that is round him for material , with more or less accuracy and play of fancy• Western Gothic represent facts VS Eastern (Arabian, Persian, Chinese) harmony in colors and forms

NATURALISM:

1. Purist2. Naturalist takes both the purist‘s and sensualist‘s and make one whole3. SensualistShort sight in nature

The Gothic builders were naturalists firm in his rendering of imaginative as of actual truthvs Roman/ Byzantine, realizes the utmost eg. Purgatory fireGreek sculptors confess of own feebleness, and with the scriptures copious records

NATURALISM

• Gothic peculiar fondness to forms of vegetation (foliage) struggled with accuracy

• Rudeness and the love of changed mingled with the rudeness of ignorance.

• Prophecy of development of entire body of natural sciences, medicine, literature, domestic wisdom and national peace.

• nourishment of the mind

FORMS OF VEGETATION

HE SAYS HE WILL ELABORATE ON THE ELEMENT OF GROTESQUE IN VOLUME III

• Stable, active rigidity; the peculiar energy which gives tension to movement and stiffness to resistance

• Gothic rigidity: Stiffness, elastic tension, studious

• Independence • Languor south cold as evil and soon forgotten • Northern Goth

RIGIDITY

• Uncalculating bestowal of the wealth of its labor accumulation of ornament, most influence on the minds of men attained by means of this attribute alone• Admit the rudeness, paradoxical but part of the humility. • Humility shown not in imperfection but in the accumulation of ornament, as the roughness• Sympathy • Universe of faultless beauty on measureless spaces

REDUNDANCE

• Outward form: more or less Gothic in proportion to the number of Gothic forms which it unites.

• Composed of pointed arches • Roof: roof proper and rook mask• Gable (snow in north) “Gothic architecture is that which uses the pointed arch for to roof proper , and the gable for the roof mask.”

GOTHIC OUTWARD FORM

• Manner depends on which this protection stands if narrow or wide• Vaulting of a bridge • Wagon vault • Nature of the curve Gothic (ribs, domical shells)• All good Gothic is nothing more than development, endlessly rearranged and repeated

ROOF

• Ought to be a curved gable • Sides curved in order to enable them to bear

pressure from without.

• 3 ways in which intervals can be bridged:• 1. Lintel • 2. Round arch • 3. Gable (Gothic)• National limitations?

TRUE NATURE OF POINTED ARCH

• 1. Greek lintelbarbarous• 2. Romanesque round arch

East/Western, or Byzantine/ LombardicArabian Gothic and Teutonic Gothic and most perfect Byzantine St Marks at Venice.

• 3. Gothic gableWest/East, Pure Gothic/Arabian Gothic

Western:1. Greek2. Western Romanesque3. Western true Gothic law of

separation “Gothic gables must have all its angle acute” “Romanesque must have upper obtuse”

Masonary pointed arch discussed at lengthneither fall out nor in.

• Foliation: Gothic naturalism, the love of foliage was exactly proportionedsouthern soft, northern thorn laid out in gold in color

• Love of leafage: form of arch “invested with the same characters of beauty which the designer had discovered in the leaf

• ”Foliated architecture, which uses the pointed arch for the roof proper, and the gable for the roof-mask”

FOLIAGE

1. If the roof rises in steep gable, high above the walls2. If the principal windows and doors have pointed arches with gables over them3. Arches are cusped or apertures foliated4. Arches in general carried on with true shafts with bases and capitals5. Plain openings in the walls, studious simple, unmoulded at the sides

RULES FOR GOOD GOTHIC:

1. Built by strong men2. Irregular3. Traceries, capitals, other ornaments are perpetually varied design4. Read the sculpture

GOOD ARCHITECTURE:

• Why did Ruskin name the book “The Stones of Venice”? What significance did it imply?

• He analyzes not only the external form of architecture in Venice’s cathedral but also the internal elements, the history and morals of the Venice cathedrals

• How is this book linked/similar to the Seven Lamps of Architecture?

• Both books analyzes cathedral architecture and Christian moral values.

• How are the two books different?• Seven Lamps of Architecture lays the foundation for

what to look for in architecture, whereas The Stones of Venice, St. Marks and The Nature of Gothic especially, is a case study to further explain the ideas

THE QUESTIONS

• Why put the chapter St Mark’s before The Nature of Gothic?

• St. Mark’s is a visual example of the Gothic before going into The Nature of Gothic

• What is the main idea he wishes to express?• Ruskin wishes to illuminate through the ideas

of internal elements and external forms of Gothic cathedral architecture the biblical morals that also relates to a nations happiness.

THE QUESTIONS

SHORT CLIP