Venice. Photograph from a glass negative after Daguerreotype (c.1846-1852), owned by The Ruskin Museum, Coniston. The Ducal Palace and the Piazzetta

This is a photographic print from The Ruskin’s collection of glass negatives both made and purchased by Ruskin as part of his pioneering photographic collection of daguerreotypes, calotypes and albumen prints. There are more than 300 glass slides in The Ruskin Whitehouse Collection, including magic lantern slides and large format glass slides. Ruskin owned one of the world’s largest collections of outdoor daguerreotypes and valued photographs as documentary records of both the natural and built environment. A portion of the photographic collection documents work undertaken by Ruskin in his capacity as the first organiser and cataloguer of ‘The Turner Bequest’, the name given to the collection of works by J. M. W. Turner bequeathed to the nation from his estate in 1856. Many more, including this glass slide of the corner of the Ducal Palace, Venice, are architectural views, and reflect Ruskin’s concern to capture a vanishing world: ‘just in time to save some evidence from the great public of wreckers’ (LE 3 (1905)/210n). This glass negative is of a daguerreotype now in the Ruskin Museum at Coniston. This daguerreotype and a salted paper print copy are published in figures 216 and 217 of Carrying Off The Palaces. John Ruskin’s Lost Daguerreotypes (2015), by Ken and Jenny Jacobson. This is the only surviving photograph of Venice showing the cannons on wheels and guardhouses fortifying the corner of the Ducal Palace in the late 1840s or early 1850s.
The unprecedented objectivity and levels of detail furnished by the daguerreotype, the first commercially successful form of photography, provided new forms of visual and temporal record of ‘great use’ for both ‘mechanical refinement’ and ‘legal evidence’ (LE 19 (1905)/150). Initially, Ruskin described his appetite for this new technology as ‘insatiable’. He was astonished by its extraordinary accuracy, ‘more valuable than any sketch can be by way of information’, and by its ability to render gradations of light and line (LE 38 (1909)/341). ‘It is very nearly the same thing as carrying off the palace itself; every chip of stone and stain is there, and of course there is no mistake about proportions’, he wrote to his father from Venice in October 1845 (LE 3 (1903)/210n). And again a week later: ‘I have been walking all over St Mark’s place today, and found a lot of things in the Daguerreotypes that I never notice in the place itself’ (Ruskin in Italy: letters to his parents, 1845, Ed. by Harold I. Shapiro (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 224-225).
While Ruskin continued to use photography as a reference point and aid for his own work, his attitude toward the medium became more ambiguous: over the course of his career, he expressed contradictory and oscillating views of this new technology. Ruskin became increasingly vocal about the dangers and limitations of apprehending the world through technologies. Ruskin emphasized the need for a direct connection with what we see, arguing that ‘this truth of mere transcript has nothing to do with Art, popularly so called, and will never supersede it’; and that the ‘sight of a great painter is as authoritative as the lens of a camera lucida’ (LE 19 (1905)/150). Despite his lasting advocacy for ‘the beautiful effects which the daguerreotype alone can seize’ (LE 11 (1904)/312) Ruskin’s enthusiasm for it waxed and waned. He argued that the hyper-accuracy of photographic representation made ‘the eye too fastidious’. Sometimes, because of the scale of the image, it even ‘fails from over-fidelity’ (LE 3 (1903)/603) to the point of distortion. For example, when miniaturized by the camera, the leaves of a tree will ‘lose their organization, and look like moss attached to sticks’ (LE 4 (1904)/312).