The Seven Lamps of Architecture; The Stones of Venice

Two books by the most widely read critic of the Victorian age. The Seven Lamps sets out seven moral conditions of good architecture: Sacrifice, Truth, Power, Beauty, Life, Memory and Obedience; The Stones of Venice finds in Gothic ornament the free, imperfect work of the craftsman’s hand.

Ruskin (1819–1900) was a painter, geologist and art critic before he wrote on architecture, and he wrote about buildings as a moralist. The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), illustrated with his own etchings, treats architecture as the art that adds to buildings something beyond utility, and asks what makes that addition good.

Each lamp is a principle. Sacrifice offers costly work to God; Truth forbids three kinds of deceit (false structure, false materials and machine-made ornament); Power and Beauty praise mass, shadow and forms drawn from nature; Life values the irregularity of handwork; Memory makes buildings bearers of history and condemns restoration as destruction; Obedience asks for a single shared national style, for Ruskin the Gothic of northern Italy.

The Stones of Venice (three volumes, 1851–53) is a history of the city through its buildings. Its central chapter, “The Nature of Gothic”, argues that the roughness and variety of Gothic carving are the signs of free labour, and contrasts them with the perfect, lifeless finish demanded by modern industry. William Morris reprinted the chapter in 1892 as a manifesto of the Arts and Crafts movement.

The book, part by part