Jonathan Keates

‘The Paradise of Cities’

Ruskin on Venice

By

Yale University Press 460pp £45 order from our bookshop

Ruskin’s is a presence which will not go away. Depending on your state of mind he is either the sublimely indispensable guru whose influence changed forever the way we look at paintings and buildings, or else a half-crazed old fusspot dogging our aesthetic footsteps with the relentless tenacity of the Ancient Mariner’s ‘frightful fiend’. His amazingly fecund inspiration casts its gleam – or its shadow, if you prefer – over everything from art history, architectural theory and travel writing to sociology, psychology and ethics. Nowhere do we feel his pervasive authority more powerfully than in Venice, the city with which he developed the most complex of all his emotional relationships.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'Ideas that I’d thought were set down in full continue to smoulder ... this book is only a snapshot of some larger… ,
    • 'Full of invention which, at its most pedestrian, is eminently Victorian, and at its most unrestrained wildly imagi… ,
    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    • RT : One of my favourite literary magazines is celebrating 40 years this year. Here is the September edition of… ,
    • 'Now that the Thames is too fast-flowing to freeze, its spirit’s devotees ... have found other climes for their pri… ,
    • 'Bythell glowers past his till at a world in slow free fall.' on the travails of a second-hand book… ,
    • 'It is a scent of animal wrath, of instinctive need, of brutal life which affects the cultured nostrils of our civi… ,
    Follow Us