The first volume of _The Stones of Venice_ appeared in March, 1851; the
first day of May of the same year we find the following entry in
Ruskin's diary: "About to enter on the true beginning of the second
part of my Venetian work. May God help me to finish it--to His glory,
and man's good." The main part of the volume was composed at Venice in
the winter of 1851-52, though it did not appear until the end of July,
1853. His work on architecture, including _The Seven Lamps_, it will be
noted, intervenes between the composition of the second and third
volumes of _Modern Painters_; and Ruskin himself always looked upon
the work as an interlude, almost as an interruption. But he also came
to believe that this digression had really led back to the heart of
the truth for all art. Its main theme, as in _The Seven Lamps of
Architecture_, is its illustration of the principle that architecture
expresses certain states in the moral temper of the people by and for
whom it is produced. It may surprise us to-day to know that when Ruskin
wrote of the glories of Venetian architecture, the common "professional
opinion was that St. Mark's and the Ducal Palace were as ugly and
repulsive as they were contrary to rule and order." In a private letter
Gibbon writes of the Square of St. Mark's as "a large square decorated
with the worst architecture I ever saw." The architects of his own time
regarded Ruskin's opinions as dictated by wild caprice, and almost
evincing an unbalanced mind. Probably the core of all this
architectural work is to be found in his chapter "On the Nature of
Gothic," in the main reproduced in this volume. And we find here again
a point of fundamental significance--that his artistic analysis led him
inevitably on to social inquiries. He proved to himself that the main
virtue of Gothic lay in the unrestricted play of the individual
imagination; that the best results were produced when every artist was
a workman and every workman an artist. Twenty years after the
publication of this book, he wrote in a private letter that his main
purpose "was to show the dependence of (architectural) beauty on the
happiness and fancy of the workman, and to show also that no architect
could claim the title to authority of _Magister_ unless he himself
wrought at the head of his men, captain of manual skill, as the best
knight is captain of armies." He himself called the chapter "precisely
and accurately the most important in the whole book." Mr. Frederic
Harrison says that in it is "the creed, if it be not the origin, of a
new industrial school of thought."