Turners Venice

18371841
This place is quite beyond everybody but Turner. (1.447)
May 6 VENICE. Thank God I am here! It is the Paradise of cities and there is a moon enough to make half the sanities of earth lunatic, striking its pure ashes of light against the grey water before the window; and I am happier than I have been these ve years so happy happier than in all probability I ever shall be again in my life, I feel fresh and young when my foot is on these pavements, and the outlines of St Marks thrill me as if they had been traced by A[dle]s hand. This and Chamouni are my two bournes of earth; there might have been another, but that has become all pain. Thank God I am here! (D, 1.183) The entry the twenty-two-year-old Ruskin made in his diary the night he arrived at Danielis Hotel on 6 May 1841 marks the beginning of his recovery from a long depression brought on by heartbreak and overwork. This was the beginning of a cycle of joy and despair that would gradually turn faster and faster, until in his sixties it became interludes of sanity and madness, ending in the deepening silence of his nal decade. The reference to Adle Domecq reveals the cause of his youthful devastation, and underlines his continuing attachment to her. Not long before his nal collapse in 1889, Ruskin wrote in a draft for his autobiography, Praeterita: the storm of stupid passion in which I had sulked during

10 J. M. W. Turner, Bridge of Sighs, Ducal Palace and Custom-House, Venice: Canaletti Painting (detail), 1833, oil on canvas, Tate Britain, London.

Turners Venice 35

11 John Ruskin, John Ruskins Rooms at Oxford, 1839, pencil and Chinese white, Ruskin Museum, Coniston.

also contributed to the London Monthly Miscellany, The Amaranth, The Keepsake and The Book of Beauty. Much of his sub-Byronic verse was inspired by his love for Adle, as in this from the London Miscellany in January 1839: Though thou hast not a feeling for one Who is torn by too many for thee; Yet oh! Not entirely unknown To thy heart can the agony be Of him whom thou leftest alone By the green and cold surge of the sea. (2.78) In January 1837, just before his eighteenth birthday, the published poet and contributor to the Magazine of Natural History took up residence at Christ Church, Oxford (gs 11 and 12). His father had avoided the possibility that he might fail the entrance requirements for an

12 John Ruskin, Christ Church Cathedral seen from Tom Quad, 1839, pencil and watercolour, Christ Church, Oxford.

38 The Approach to Venice

his writing for Friendships Offering. The articles are another unnished project of Ruskins youth and towards the end were beginning to lose their way, but they show him trying out various voices, sometimes comic, sometimes elevated and sometimes obscurely mathematical, as exercises in critical authority. The approach is essentially literary: Our object, let it always be remembered, is not the attainment of architectural data, but the formation of taste (1.29). This taste is for the picturesque, demonstrated by a discussion of the relationship between domestic architecture and the landscape that frames it, written in a manner that recalls Mrs Radcliffes scenic descriptions in The Mysteries of Udolpho. He tries to establish a typology of both land and buildings in order to identify national characteristics. The consequence of this literary approach is a Romantic in-reading of architecture: it is, or ought to be, a science of feeling more than of rule, a ministry to the mind, more than to the eye. . . . no man can be an architect, who is not a metaphysician (1.5). The most striking aspect of The Poetry of Architecture is that Ruskin appears to be completely oblivious to the growing tension in architectural and religious circles about the Gothic Revival. This is partly because his theme neatly sidesteps the subject of ecclesiastical architecture. The word Gothic is used on occasion, but only as an uncontroversial adjective, for instance referring in a footnote to modern builders of Gothic chapels as inadequate (1.136n). It may have been as well that the series was interrupted, for in February 1839 Ruskin became involved in a far more scholarly endeavour, the Oxford Society for Promoting the Study of Gothic Architecture. As an ancient city, Oxford experienced not so much a Gothic revival as a Gothic continuity, but by the 1830s the choice of Gothic as a style for new building was becoming more than a matter of taste (g. 14). It was a matter of belief. While the Evangelical wing of the Church of England retained a puritan suspicion of idolatry, High Anglicans were increasingly drawn to a revival of the ritual and practices that their church had inherited from its roots in Catholicism. Architectural aesthetics were thus also a matter of theology, as polemically demonstrated in 1836 by the architect and Catholic convert, August Welby Pugin (181252), in the rst edition of Contrasts, or a parallel between the noble edices of the fourteenth and fteenth Century and similar buildings of the present day; shewing the present decay of taste. After the Napoleonic War economic expansion and urbanisation prompted a nationwide programme of church building and restoration, launched by the Church Building Act of 1818, which resulted in the construction of 214 new churches, 174 of them in a for the most part debased Gothic style. The decision in 1835 to rebuild the Houses of Parliament in the Gothic manner, where the detailed styling and furniture was to be designed by Pugin, demonstrated ofcial acceptance of the Gothic for new building. Architectural revival, however, went hand in hand with religious revival. A group of dons at Oxford where, as at Cambridge, it was necessary to have been ordained in the Church of England in order to hold a fellowship had begun to argue that the way to revive the faith was through a return to priestly authority, as established by the Apostolic Succession that led back to the early church via Rome. Their acknowledged leader was Dr Edward Pusey, Professor of Hebrew and a Canon of Christ Church, but the most charismatic gure

14 John Ruskin, Oxford: Merton College and Magpie Lane, 1838, pencil and watercolour, Ruskin Library, Lancaster.

was John Henry Newman, Fellow of Oriel and Vicar of the University Church of St Marys, where he preached High Church revival. In 1833 Newman published the rst of a collaborative series, Tracts for the Times, which gave the Oxford Movement its name. Publication continued until Tract 90 in 1841, again written by Newman, in which he argued that it was possible to reconcile the rules of the Church of England, as contained in the Thirty-nine Articles, with the Catholic truth of Rome. In 1845 Newman followed the logic of his own arguments and was received into the Roman Catholic Church, and although some Tractarians, including Pusey, did not follow, others did, to the consternation of the Evangelicals.

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16 J. M. W. Turner, Childe Harolds Pilgrimage Italy, 1832, oil on canvas, Tate Britain, London.

1837 (acquired by Ruskins father in 1847) has an accompanying quotation from The Merchant of Venice that draws attention to the tiny gure of Shylock that appears on the righthand edge of the picture (g. 17). Ian Warrell comments that the picture is set in a version of the past drawn from Shakespeare, revealing that at this stage Turner remained content to engage primarily with the city at second-hand, as it had been conjured up in his imagination by his literary compatriots (2003a, 23). Second-hand might suggest a lack of originality on Turners part, but far from it. As a son of the eighteenth century, Turner saw himself in relation to an inherited tradition. When, in 1833, he chose to depict Venice in oil for the rst time twelve years after he had last seen the place, but shortly after a period of intensive work illustrating Byron he set it in a painterly as well as a poetic past. The motif of Bridge of Sighs, Ducal Palace and CustomHouse, Venice: Canaletti Painting (g. 10) is both an acknowledgement of his predecessor Canalettos vision of the city (for there he is, in period costume, working on an already framed canvas) and, in his dry, scumbled surface so different from Canalettos glassy sparkle, a challenge to it. The historical references in Turners Venetian paintings Canaletto, Shylock, Juliet serve as reminders that Turner was imagining the city, not simply topographically recording it. As the cultural critic John Pemble has pointed out: we have a Venice which is at the same time past and present. And it is important that this is of a Venice, not the

17 J. M. W. Turner, The Grand Canal, Venice, 1837, oil on canvas, Huntington Library, Pasadena.

54 The Approach to Venice

19 John Ruskin, Casa Contarini-Fasan, Venice, 1841, pencil and wash, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

20 J. M. W. Turner, Lightning in the Piazzetta, 1840, watercolour and bodycolour, Tate Britain, London.

perative trip to the empty and as yet unexploited sands of the Lido, in the afternoon his spirits rose as he began work on a drawing of St Marks: Trying to get the local colour of the church. It was such a pleasure to have ones eye kept on those beautiful and strange details with the quiet sketching attention, and to be able to lie back in ones chair every now and then look round on the vast square and bright evening sky, and red relief of St Giorgio, and blue sea, with the bright-eyed people moving through it all. I never took so luxurious a drawing in my life. I have sat now and then in such places, but always idly, seldom with my pencil in my hand, touching now and then, feeling I was doing something, and that with no picturesque ugliness, but with an object which it is delight to have ones eyes drawn to. Then when I left the square, before the sunset at it, rather there was a light such as Turner in his maddest moments never came up to; it turned the masts of the guard frigate into absolute pointed re, and the woods of the botanic gardens took it in the same way not as if it were light on them, but in them. (D, 1.1856) Ruskins verbal descriptions seem, however, only to underline his frustration with the restricted conventions that he had learned from Prout: it is penance to draw in grey, and

A heavy thunder cloud came over the Doges palace in the twilight, and rapid limitless ashes of silent lightning showed rst behind its ridges, as the rockets rose behind the smoke of St Angelo [Ruskin is remembering the reworks in Rome]; then retired over Lido, lighting the whole noble group of the Salute with a bluish spectral white, as every ash touched on it with vague, mysterious gracefulness Turners own the edges of the dome dark against the reected lighting on the ground of sky. I must try if I cannot give the effect some time. (D, 1.185) Ironically, Ruskin had no need to give the effect of summer lightning in Venice, for Turner had already caught it brilliantly in August 1840 (g. 20). After Sunday, when he notes, I have got all wrong with my drawing (D, 1.185), Ruskin makes no entry for Monday or Tuesday, though we learn from his Wednesday entry that on the Monday night he had been in St Marks Square: again late, for the music; and too much excited it did me harm (D, 1.186). On Tuesday morning he felt ill, but after a recu-

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21 J. M. W. Turner, Campo Santo, Venice, 1842, oil on canvas, Toledo Museum of Art.

22 J. M. W. Turner, The Dogana, San Giorgio, Citella, from the Steps of the Europa, 1842, oil on canvas, Tate Britain, London.

looking west with the blue line of the Alps, and the new white wall of the cemetery island of San Michele, constructed by order of Napoleon, on the right. Ruskin then dissolves that image into The Dogana, San Giorgio, Citella from the Steps of the Europa (g. 22), almost a reverse angle of Turners viewpoint of his Bridge of Sighs . . . Canaletti Painting of 1833, with the domes of Palladios San Giorgio Maggiore and Le Zitelle in the middle distance. It took another visit to Venice, in 1845, for Ruskin to recognise that if he was to write truthfully about Venice, he would have to learn to see it through his own eyes. In acknowledgement, in 1846, when a new edition of the rst volume of Modern Painters was called for, he cancelled all the material quoted above and substituted virtually a fresh chapter, withdrawing most of his praise for Turners contemporaries and criticising Turners later Venetian paintings. His reasons for doing so are hinted at in his diary entry of 8 May 1841: a little of my romance is going (D, 1.185), which by 14 May had become a little of my romance is gone (D, 1.187). His youthful romanticism was beginning to be tempered by a more mature scepticism. Writing to Edward Clayton from Mantua on 20 May, he describes his visit to that most Byronic of locations, the prisons reached by the Bridge of Sighs, and writes of these secret chambers: It looks now as if there had been a slight proportion of what one would call gammon about it (1.453).

This is not to suggest that either Byron or Turner did not have a profoundly formative inuence on Ruskins conception of Venice. Byrons verse and Turners paintings shaped the moral and political context in which he created for himself his great theme of the fall of Venice and its meaning for the England of his day. But before he could give it life and form, it was necessary to see Venice not only as a poet and a painter but as a historian. His verdict on the achievements of the visit of 1841 in Praeterita was: I knew absolutely nothing of architecture proper, had never drawn a section nor a leaf moulding; but liked, as Turner did to the end of his days, anything that was graceful and rich, whether Gothic or Renaissance; was entirely certain and delicate in pencil-touch; and drew with an acuteness of delight in the thing as it actually stood, which makes the sketch living and like, from corner to corner. Thus much I could do, and did do, for the last time. (35.296) In his study of literary imaginings of Venice, Venice Desired (1992), the cultural critic Tony Tanner explains just why Ruskin should cancel his most ecstatic appreciation of Turners Venice: Ruskin was to set out to build a Venice of his own. Stone, as it were, by stone (1992, 75).

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