Ruskin’s introduction to Volume II of The Stones of Venice describes Venice as a place where the past cannot be fully restored, even in the imagination of the Victorian traveller: “The important feelings of romance, so singularly characteristic of this century, may indeed gild, but never save the remains of those mightier ages” (4). And yet, it would appear that Ruskin relies on his imagination in order to salvage what has disappeared.

Ruskin traces the history of Venice to its earliest geological origins and his depiction of nature is one that simultaneously creates and destroys this unique place. “And all that which in nature was wild or merciless,” he writes, “––Time and Decay, as well as the waves and tempests, had been won to adorn her instead of destroy” (4). However, the remains of Venice, the Venice that belonged to Henry Danaldo or Francis Foscari, Ruskin tells us, “lie hidden behind the cumbrous masses which were the delight of the nation in its dotage; hidden in many a grass-grown court, and silent pathway, and lightless canal, where the slow waves have sapped their foundation for five hundred years, and must soon prevail over them forever” (5). This ambiguous response is interesting and one worth thinking about in terms of architecture and the way that the built environment changes over the course of hundreds of years in the hands of nature and art. Do ruins offer glimpses of what is meant to disappear? Indeed, the history of Venice, Ruskin tells us, is written in its natural foundation, formed out of “the accumulation of the ruins of ages” (6). It will be interesting to see how this argument develops in “The Nature of Gothic.”

During that period, up to say 1926, there is very little evidence of institutional abuse of the injured, particularly the neurasthenic injured, who came home after the war, but some circumstantial evidence (men going from nursing home to nursing home, or from domestic settings into nursing homes) suggesting that some men may have been abused, or maybe, abusive? It’s really difficult to know when one is following evidence and when one’s own culture and preoccupations are imposing a form on circumstances that could be read very differently by others, from other places, at other times!

Then he turns abruptly to the landward side and approaches the city via its geological and geographical position, and he shifts from the present and near past to an almost primordial period. Venice rises by the vision of God (rather than an enchanter’s rod) on an unlikely tidal swamp. But he is still uneasy: the grand palaces have still have slippery, seawardy steps, marking the instability of the city and its powerful elite. Its decline from its heroic medieval heyday to its Renaissance corruption is apparently a matter of destiny?