Surface, Depth and Form: John Ruskin’s ‘The Nature of Gothic’

The central chapter of the middle volume of Ruskin’s trilogy The Stones of Venice (1851–1853), ‘The Nature of Gothic’, describes ideal qualities of ‘Gothicness’ to be used to judge or construct architecture, architectural ornament and even artistic forms generally. Central to this Gothicness is ‘Naturalism’, the loving experience and interpretation of nature by human hands, hearts and minds. Some stunning work has recently elucidated Ruskin’s emphasis on surface and his preference for the solid walls of Veronese or indeed Venetian ‘Surface Gothic’ over the foliation-eaten lacework of the French, ‘Linear’ variety. However, I will argue Ruskin theorises kinds of depth residing beneath the surface of ‘Surface Gothic’. Ruskin’s ‘Naturalism’ amounts to a theory of the movement of ‘form’ between the surface and the depth of architectural material.

This Gothic movement of form is a political dynamic: it enables the individual workman to work freely and to interpret nature in his (or her) own imperfect, loving way. With this, Ruskin envisages a way out of the nightmare of modernity he sees happening all over Europe and which he reimagines in his part-history, part-myth of the rise and terrible fall of Venice. My emphasis on depth will allow me to emphasise the human dimension to Ruskin’s Gothic and I will argue this complements Lars Spuybroek’s recent mesmerising manifesto drawn from Ruskin for the construction of Digital-Gothic cities (2011, 2016). Turning to the question of temporality, I will conclude that Ruskin’s Gothic form is available to the present day because it is historically unstable, existing somewhere in a Venice both lost and found.