RUSKIN, John.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

The Stones of Venice. First edition of one of the key texts of the aesthetic movement, composer Jerome Kern's copy with his bookplate in each volume, being lot 1027 in the catalogue of the famous 1929 Anderson Galleries sale of Kern's library, the final major sale of the golden age of book collecting. Ruskin's The Stones of Venice and The Seven Lamps of Architecture "with their obsession with the function and aesthetics of architecture, over and beyond its history and practice, … proved a revolutionary success" (PMM). "The importance of The Stones of Venice lies … in its celebration of the Byzantine and the Gothic, which had an immediate effect on Victorian architects, who began to introduce Romanesque forms and Venetian and Veronese colour and sculptural features into their designs" (ODNB). In the most famous chapter, "The nature of Gothic", which was twice reprinted in his lifetime (first for the inauguration of the London Working Men's College in 1854, and second by William Morris in 1892), "Ruskin argued that under conditions of industrialization and the division of labour, social disharmony and industrial unrest were bound to occur, because the previously expressive craftsman-Ruskin's ideal working man-had been reduced to the condition of a machine" (ODNB).

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