Building Ruskin’s Italy: Watching Architecture by Stephen Kite (review)

John Ruskin has had some bad press recently. With his portrayal as a ridiculous lisping fop in Mr. Turner (2014) and as a cruel sexual deviant in Effie Gray (2014), contemporary film directors seem to have it in for him. Stephen Kite’s Building Ruskin’s Italy: Watching Architecture provides a welcome corrective to such caricatures. While Kite alerts his reader early on that it is not to Ruskin’s troubled psyche that he is drawn, his book conveys just how much there remains to gain from Ruskin’s singular architectural writings. The volume and care of Kite’s architectural research, together with his approach as a practitioner, generate a unique perspective. Just as Ruskin attended to the logistics of each architectural structure he wrote about, drew, or daguerreotyped, Kite gives us an invaluable technical language with which to reassess the minutiae of Ruskin’s observations on historical buildings.

After a brief introduction, Building Ruskin’s Italy proceeds through six chapters that follow Ruskin’s analyses of Italian architecture. Chapter 1 begins with Ruskin’s declared foundational moment, the receipt of Samuel Rogers’s Italy (1823) with steel engravings of works by J. M. W. Turner, to which he famously attributed so much of his future direction. It ends with Ruskin’s first long European tour with his parents from 1840 to 1841. The second chapter traces Ruskin’s journey to Venice in 1845, without the actual presence of his parents or the virtual mediating one of his respected teachers, Turner or the artist Samuel Prout. Kite reads this journey as heralding a major shift from Ruskin’s focus on the surface picturesque to his understanding of the “acuity of the mass, space and surface of Italian architecture” (3). Ruskin’s change in understanding drives his detailed studies of the fourteenth century Palazzo Agostini in Pisa. His response to the Basilica of San Frediano in Lucca, meanwhile, conveys what Kite calls a “new architectonic sensibility” (3).

Chapters 3 and 4, by comparison, take us back to Venice. While chapter 3 follows Ruskin’s “watching” of Byzantine structures to reveal the “important constructional precepts” with which to newly understand Ruskin’s “typology of Gothic,” chapter 4 interprets Ruskin’s methods of reading architecture by situating his neglected Venetian diaries and notebooks in relation to the buildings themselves (98). Of particular note is Kite’s discussion of Ruskin’s detailed analysis of the orders of Venetian arches, as they come to provide clues to the entire system of Venetian Gothic. The last two chapters then transport the reader to Ruskin’s beloved Verona. Chapter 5 takes up Ruskin’s tellingly labeled “Bit Book” of 1850, to explore what Kite calls “Ruskin’s troubling building-ornament divide” (145, 4). The final chapter charts Ruskin’s later responses to architecture together with his legacy as played out in the work of Adrian Stokes. In this context, Kite makes fruitful use of his earlier writing on Stokes.

Especially welcome is Kite’s discussion of Ruskin’s elaborate worksheets, pocket books, and sketches done on site; he understands, in ways previously not so evident, the architectural significance of Ruskin’s elaborate system of cross-referencing. Throughout, Kite is in tune with Ruskin’s architectural impulses, including his reasons for crushing into its last volume the rationale for The Stones of Venice (1851). He demonstrates the importance of attending to Ruskin’s impetus to “watch” architecture, with the root of the term in meaning to “watch over” or “care for.” Yet Ruskin’s commitment over the course of time to “watching” so many buildings reveals that it is not within their power to remain static or unchanged. And just as buildings are changed by weathering and age, so too, by definition, the project of watchfulness must adapt, remaining forever unfinished as such architecture becomes a source of anxiety for its watcher who tries by all manner of marks to fix its forms.

When Ruskin writes pensively about the...