Loggia of the Ducal Palace, Venice

John Ruskin

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Ruskin painstakingly depicted the shafts, capitals, and ogival lacework of Venice's most famous Gothic loggia. The red tinge to the first two shafts comes from the use of a different colored marble to mark the place from which sentences of death were proclaimed. Through the loggia, Saint Mark's Basilica is visible. Ruskin, one of the most influential voices in the nineteenth-century art world, had a lasting love for Venice; among his most influential writings was a lengthy study of its history and architecture, The Stones of Venice (1851-53). His impassioned advocacy of the Venetian Gothic was a significant source for Gothic Revival architecture.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art