John Ruskin, Venice, and the 'Stones' of an Italian utopia

Abstract

I am fully aware that the investigation of the relationship between Ruskin and Venice is by no means original, and that The Stones of Venice is one of the most widely read, analysed and quoted texts of the Ruskinian canon. I am equally aware that my proposal of regarding Ruskin's discourse on Venice as a dialogue strongly marked by his aesthetic and moral utopianism delineates a territory which has been already trodden by scholars and Ruskinites. Despite these discouraging considerations, I wish to say that I have based the motivation for my paper on the fact that some new ideas could be elaborated, thanks to an intertextual methodology in the reading of The Stones of Venice. Considering the very lively contemporary debate on Ruskin's work, I would like to offer a contribution focused on the way he articulated his ideas regarding a better world in the future. Indeed, his style, far from being an anodyne linguistic medium, is the locus in which his voice tried to give expression to a message centred on the search of a fullness of Being and a fullness of Life. In this, he was waging war on the specialisms introduced by the new industrial structure of British society. As a consequence, his worldview- apart from being against the grain-was always tinged with a line of utopianism which, in Ruskin's case, meant above all a holistic approach to culture.