John Ruskin - nonfiction - 1851-53 - p. 19    

Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice is a three-volume study on the art and architecture of Venice, Italy, through the Byzantine, Gothic, and Renaissance periods; Ruskin also integrated his views on the need for social reform and his vision for how the social order should be restructured into his criticism. This text inspired the narrator in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

Ruskin was a prominent English art critic throughout the Victorian Era whose work influenced successors such as Kenneth Clark. Also a multidisciplinary writer, painter, and philanthropist, he founded a utopian society called the Guild of St. George based on his philosophical and moral ideals While he advocated for the education and rights of women, he also believed that their responsibilities lay primarily in the domestic sphere.

Key elements: art, Europe, Gothic