Golgonooza on the Grand Canal: Ruskin’s Stones of Venice and the Romantic Imagination

Abstract

Examines Ruskin’s concept of the imagination as expressed in The Stones of Venice. Demonstrates how Ruskin uses architecture to gauge the moral temper of an age, and how he deduces something about the imagination as an organizing principle for this study. Links Ruskin’s ideas on imagination with those of Wordsworth and Coleridge.