Moving to the interior, the ecologies of nature are likewise engendered in generously layered hierarchies of surface, scaled to simplicity or splendour.
Here that ‘love of the very skin and surface of the earth’ is expressed as a layered composition akin to the images of a medieval missal.
The medieval spirit of Red House-the home Webb designed for Morris in 1858–9-emulated the hortus ludi of the Garden of Pleasure a vision that would have been fully captured in the ‘Palace of Art’ Webb planned for the Morris and Burne-Jones families as a U-plan enlargement of Red House, which was never realised. This chapter examines the emergence of Ruskin’s wall veil in his readings of the Gothic surfaces of Venice, and its translation to the wall planes of the Arts and Crafts dwellings of Morris, and Philip Webb. In the first volume of The Stones of Venice (1851), Ruskin had demonstrated how humanity takes these material gifts of nature to form the wall, membrane-like, as ‘an even and united fence, whether of wood, earth, stone or metal’ thus the ‘earth-veil’ translates to what he calls the ‘wall-veil’ as the main enclosing surface in architecture. Expanding on the ecology of the earth veil Ruskin depicts it variously as ‘a carpet’, as ‘a fantasy of embroidery’ of ‘tall spreading of foliage’ with the ‘unerring uprightness as of temple pillars’ all cleaving to the underlying strength of rock or transient sand. Following his acknowledged ‘master’ Ruskin, William Morris writes in News from Nowhere (1892) of ‘the spirit of the new days, of our days’ as a ‘delight in the life of the world intense and overweening love of the very skin and surface of the earth, on which man dwells, such as a lover has in the fair flesh of the woman he loves’.
And Ruskin opens his fifth volume of Modern Painters (1860) with this preeminent surface, ‘The Earth-Veil’: ‘The earth in its depths must remain dead and cold, incapable except of slow crystalline change but at its surface, which human beings look upon and deal with, it ministers to them through a veil of strange intermediate being’. For John Ruskin, the first surface of Venice-his amphibious ‘sea-dog of towns’-was naturally not that of architecture itself, but the protean ‘salt-smelling skin’ of the sandy earth whereupon it arose.
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