Reviews for The Stones of Venice: Volume II. The Sea-Stories

The average rating for The Stones of Venice: Volume II. The Sea-Stories based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-06-06 00:00:00 Jose Cadavid A great primary source, but difficult to find useful for contemporary readers other than as an example of past art historical style and thought. Often painfully detailed and descriptive - this approach is more successful in the illustrated analysis of ornament and architectural form than in the seemingly endless listing of the features of every column on the Ducal Palace. The latter, while essential to pre-20th-C readers who could not visit Venice, is utterly useless to an audience who now can access photographs of these works and see for themselves what Ruskin endeavors to put into words for scores of boring pages. The entire volume is very uneven in its treatment of various monuments - the Murano cathedral section is quite balanced between architectural description, aesthetic analysis, and religious interpretation, but others devolve into long subjective rants about culture or theology that say more about British society than Italian art.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-09-28 00:00:00 Justin Rice In the second volume in this famous trilogy, John Ruskin offers an extremely in-depth, if also extremely subjective, assessment of Venetian architecture during the high points of Venetian economic and imperial expansion. Emphasizing strongly the apex of Venetian artistic creativity as realized through a cosmopolitan approach to beauty, this volume neatly, perhaps too neatly, attempts to place Venetian culture as a heterogeneous amalgamation. With a critical approach typical of the Victorian Period, one will receive an excessive amount of postulating, hyperbole, and florid prose, but the result is still an extremely important and gorgeously written example of exceptional writing on architecture.