John Ruskin visited Venice numerous times over the course of his life, starting in 1835, and after long stays in the city he published his three-volume masterpiece The Stones of Venice—a gorgeous paean to the beauty, uniqueness and fragility of this city that was destined to become a cornerstone of English culture and mark the beginning of the Gothic Revival. Venice, in Ruskin’s drawings and watercolors, is a theater of "lost time" that builds up traces of historical time even as it is subject to erasure and destruction. In Venice with Ruskin is a meditation on the city, its architecture, its bittersweet relationship with nature, Ruskin’s dialogue with the great Venetian artists whose works he reproduced, the curiosity that prompted him to explore it and the imagination with which he captured its essence on paper.