‘A ‘new clue’: Ruskin’s Guide to the Principal Pictures in the Academy of Fine Arts at Venice (1877), the history of Venetian art and the idea of the museum’

This paper considers Ruskin’s Guide to the Principal Pictures in the Academy of Fine Arts at Venice (1877) in the light of his earlier thinking about the nature and purpose of museums and his concurrent creation of St George’s Museum at Walkley. Usually dismissed as betraying mental instability, a careful reading of the Guide and its intertexts, especially St Mark’s Rest, shows it textually to reorder the Academy’s collection in ways blurring the distinction between ‘national’ and ‘local’ museums for which Ruskin had argued in the 1850s and ideally to form part of the discourse explanatory of the ‘design’ of the Walkley museum.