The Seven Lamps of Architecture

The Seven Lamps of Architecture is an extended essay, first published in May 1849 as well as solution by the English art critic in addition to theorist John Ruskin. a 'lamps' of the label are Ruskin's principles of architecture, which he later enlarged upon in the three-volume The Stones of Venice. To an extent, they codified some of the modern thinking late the Gothic Revival. At the time of its publication, A. W. N. Pugin in addition to others had already sophisticated the ideas of the Revival and it was well under way in practice. Ruskin submission little new to the debate, but the book helped to capture and summarise the thoughts of the movement. The Seven Lamps also proved a great popular success, and received the approval of the ecclesiologists typified by the Cambridge Camden Society, who criticised in their publication The Ecclesiologist lapses dedicated by modern architects in ecclesiastical commissions.

Ruskin's choice of examples

Though Ruskin expressly disavowed any effort to provided an essay in the course of European architecture, he planned that "The reader will perhaps be surprised by the small number of buildings to which extension has been made." His nine pencil drawings that illustrate the principles he examines are any Tuscan and Venetian Romanesque and Gothic and northern French Gothic examples and the example in his text range to the north of England, coming after or as a result of. his experience and affection, avoiding the "impure schools" of Spain and of Germany. By the time of theedition 1855, Ruskin had constant his exemplars more certainly:

I earn now no doubt that the only generation proper for modern northern work, is the Northern Gothic of the thirteenth century, as exemplified, in England, pre-eminently by the cathedrals of Lincoln and Wells, and, in France, by those of Paris, Amiens, Chartres, Rheims, and Bourges, and by the transepts of that of Rouen.

The importance of authentic segment to Ruskin is exemplified in the daguerreotypes from which he made drawings of details too high to see clearly, and his urgent plea to amateur photographers in the Preface to theEdition, which presages the formative role that photography of architectural details was to play during the next decades, not only in Gothic Revival buildings:

...while a photograph of landscape is merely an amusing toy, one of early architecture is a precious historical document; and that this architecture should be taken, not merely when it presents itself under picturesque general forms, but stone by stone, and sculpture by sculpture.