Kalliope’s Reviews > Ruskin's Venice: The Stones Revisited > Status Update

I am amused by how much Ruskin dislikes the styles from the Renaissance. He only tolerates those Renaissace which are not Renaissance, namely those influenced by Byzantine or by Gothic.

2/2

..and its burning legends written, than in lifting the rocks of granite higher than the clouds of heaven, and veiling them with their various mantle of purple flower and shadowy pine.

1/2

Sometimes when walking at evening on the Lido, whence the great chain of the Alps, crested with silver clouds, might be rising above the front of the Ducal Palace, I used to feel as much in awe in gazing on the buildings as on the hills, and could believe that God had done a greater work in breathing into the narrowness of dust the mighty spirits by whom its haughty walls had been raised,

Such beautiful capitals.

Trajan doing justice to the widow. He is riding spiritually, his mantle blown out behind; the widow kneeling before his horse.This is of peculiar interest in its relation to the question of the character of the later government in Venice. It is the assertion of its belief that Justice only could be the foundation of its stability; as these stones of Justice and Judgement as the foundation of its halls of council.

The most characteristic sentiment ..in the working of the Gothic heart, was the frank confession of its own weakness;...the results of our inquiry... to state that the principal element in the Renaissance spirit is its firm confidence in its own wisdom.

Extraordinary sculpture in the Ducal Palace.

And now onto the Ducal Palace.

I can't wait to read Ruskin's opinion.

2/2

It was also in the Hotel Danieli where Marcel Proust stayed when he visited Venice.

1/2
Palazzo Nani-Mocenigo (now Hotel Danieli)

A glorious example of the central Gothic, nearly contemporary with the fines parts of the Ducal palace....

From 1822, the second floor of the old palace was occupied by the Hotel Danieli where Ruskin stayed with his parents in 1835. The proprietor, Joseph Dal Niel acquired the rest of the building in 1840, and reopened it as the Danieli in 1845.