Building Ruskins Italy: Watching Architecture

Based on extensive fieldwork, and research into John Ruskins still little-interpreted archival material, notebooks and drawings (in the Ruskin Library, Lancaster University, UK and elsewhere), Stephen Kite offers an unprecedented account of the evolution of Ruskins architectural thinking and observation in the context of Italy where his watching of building achieved its greatest intensity. Kite presents the complex story of Ruskins visual thinking in architecture as a narrative of deepening interpretation and representation, focusing on the humbler monuments of Italy. He shows how Ruskins early picturesque naturalism was transformed by the realisation that to understand the built realities confronting him in Italy demanded a closer engagement with the substance of the stones themselves; reflecting Ruskins sense of his task as a near-archaeological gleaning and gathering of remains hidden in many a grass grown court, and silent pathway, and lightless canal.