“Venice’s Sinking” - “The Quarry”
Ruskin writes, “Now Venice, as she was once the most religious, was in her fall the most corrupt, of European states; and as she was in her strength the centre of the pure currents of Christian architecture, so she is in her decline the source of the Renaissance. It was the originality and splendor of the palaces of Vicenza and Venice which gave this school its eminence in the eyes of Europe; and the dying city, magnificent in her dissipation, and graceful in her follies, obtained wider worship in her decrepitude than in her youth, and sank from the midst of her admirers into the grave.” Venice’s conversion from a religious epic to an axis of corruption is ironic; it would be predicted that the ‘Christian architecture’ would have subsidized permanent decency in Venice. The ironic corruption highlights the enormousness of Venice’s deterioration which would not be averted by the representative architecture. Venice’s waning was symptomatically inexorable.
‘Lord Lindsay’s Book’ - “The Virtues of Architecture”
Theologists, such as Lord Lindsay, advance perplexing and ironic creeds. Ruskin expounds, “Not that, in reality, one division of the man is more human than another. Theologists fall into this error very fatally and continually; and a man from whom I have learned much, Lord Lindsay, has hurt his noble book by it, speaking as if the spirit of the man only were immortal, and were opposed to his intellect, and the latter to the senses; whereas all the divisions of humanity are noble or brutal, immortal or mortal, according to the degree of their sanctification; and there is no part of the man which is not immortal and divine when it is once given to God, and no part of him which is not mortal by the second death, and brutal before the first, when it is withdrawn from God.” The theologists’ error is ironic considering that they are conversant with religion. The blatant error in Lord Lindsay’s book indicates that he is contradicted for it renders humanity both mortal and immortal, yet these two practicalities are mutually exclusive.
