Insular Connections: Representations of Venice in the Long Nineteenth Century

In the beginning of The Stones of Venice, John Ruskin provides his reader with a powerful justification for his elaborate analysis of Venice and its art: like Venice and, before Venice, Tyre, England was a thalassocracy that owed its political and cultural position to its position in the sea. Since decadence had characterized both Tyre and Venice, England had to carefully study the history of its predecessors to avoid following their path. Ruskin’s brief genealogy designed a map of western civilization based on islands and their connections with their inlands and empires, but also, ideally, among themselves. Tyre, as some of Ruskin’s readers might have known, was the mythical birthplace of Europa, the Phoenician nymph raped by Zeus. Venice, Ruskin wrote, was as beautiful as Tyre had been, but was “still left for our beholding in the final period of her decline,” thus bearing witness to its own decadence.

Like Ruskin, other 19^th century British travelers saw Venice as an intermediate stage between the Mediterranean civilization of antiquity and the Northern European hegemony of their time. In their representations, the Adriatic was not a metonym of the Mediterranean, but its first Northern version, an imaginary link between the Mediterranean and the Northern Seas. Starting from Ruskin’s work, my paper explores some of these narratives to contextualize and analyze the role of these representations of Venice, presented as a city not only between the sea and the land, but also between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. My goal is to highlight both the importance of the concept of insularity and the figural connection between England and Venice, created to cope with the anxieties produced by the process of modernization in the British travelers to Venice.