La Serenissima by Jonathan Keates review — the decline and fall of Venice | Times2

In the sonorous Victorian opening chord of a sentence that begins John Ruskin’s masterpiece Stones of Venice, the nice critic observes that “because the first dominion of males was asserted over the oceans, three thrones of mark past all others have been set upon its sands: the thrones of Tyre, Venice and England”. Of those nice maritime empires, Ruskin writes, Tyre is little greater than a reminiscence and Venice a break. Solely England stands. She should heed the warning of the previous or discover herself condemned to a “much less pitied destruction” than even her fallen predecessors. In that marvellously untimely prophecy of imperial decline — written almost 30 years earlier than Victoria was topped Empress of India in 1877 — Ruskin anticipated what Venice would