The 'Inventio' Mosaic (Finding the Body of St. Mark)

This meticulous copy is said to be by Ruskin himself (although the treatment of figures, especially the facial features, is comparable with the work of his favoured copyist Angelo Alessandri). Ruskin thought the mosaics of St. Mark’s “the bible of old Venice”, and determined to have records made of them when they were under threat of wholesale replacement in the late 1870s: this desecration was later halted.