Architecture, Design, Mathematics and Material Cultures

The Ruskin Whitehouse Collection contains some of Ruskin’s most important works on architecture, alongside his own architectural drawings, sketches and notebooks containing detailed inventories of arches, windows and doorways. Venice captivated Ruskin. Over his lifetime, he visited the ‘City of Water’ eleven times, recording the measurements, shapes, decorations and colours of its architecture, including churches and palaces in a series of worksheets and notebooks in preparation for his major publication, The Stones of Venice.

Fascinated by form, pattern, proportion and symmetry in the world around us, Ruskin wrote that art begins with ‘command of line’. He believed that mathematical knowledge underpinned both the technical proficiency and the ‘analytic power’ needed to compose a work of art. To this end, he published three drawing manuals – The Elements of Drawing, The Elements of Perspective and the Laws of Fesolé – to be read alongside the first three books of Euclid’s Elements.