g to be felt by all thinkers on art, Ruskin, with his theory of
moral aesthetics, could never recognize. For him the corruption of the
art is due to the moral corruption of the artist: if the artist remained
truthfully modest, the perfection of the art would continue
indefinitely.

Again, the necessity of referring all good art to morality and all bad
art to immorality, obliges Ruskin to postulate that every period which
has produced bad art has been a period of moral decay. The artistic
habits which displease him must be a direct result of a vicious way of
feeling and acting in all things: the decay of Venetian architecture and
sculpture must be distinctly referable to the decay of Venetian morality
in the 15th century; and the final corruption and ruin of the state
must be traced to the moral obliquity which caused Venetians to adopt
pseudo-classic forms in the Riva facade of the Ducal palace; moral
degradation and artistic degradation, acting and re-acting on each
other, bring about, according to Ruskin, political ruin; the iniquities
of the men who became apostates to Gothic architecture are visited upon
their distant descendants, upon the Venetians of the days of Campo
Formio. Now here again the ethical basis induces a complete historical
misconception, a misconception not only in the history of art, but also
in the history of civilization. For, just as his system of moral sin and
artistic punishment blinds Ruskin to the necessities of change and decay
in art, so, also, it prevents his seeing the inevitable necessity of
political growth and decline. Ruskin seeks the cause of the fall of
Venice in moral corruption manifested, or supposed to be manifested, in
art; but the cause of the fall of Venice must be sought elsewhere. Look
at this lagoon, this Adriatic, this Mediterranean: in the 14th century
they are the source of the greatness of the Zenos and Pisanis; three or
four hundred years later they will be the cause of the pettiness of the
Morosinis and Emos. In the present, in this time of Dandolo, into which
Ruskin has led us, it is to them that Venice owes the humiliation of
Barbarossa in the porch of St. Mark's; to them in the future will
be owed the triumph of Bonaparte and the tricolour waving from the
flagstaff of the square. For in the middle ages the sea means the
Mediterranean and the Baltic, the two great navigable, wealth-yielding
lakes, and around them arises prosperity: Amalfi, Pisa, Genoa, Venice,
Lue