St. Mark's (Il Basilico di San Marco) with the flooded Piazza San Marco
Venice
The edge of the Campanile is visible at right.
Photograph by George P. Landow, October 2000
John Ruskin's The Stones of Venice which mentions "reading a building as we would read Milton or Dante" (10.206), explains that St. Mark's "is to be regarded less as a temple wherein to pray, than as itself a Book of Common Prayer, a vast illuminated missal, bound with alabaster instead of parchment, studded with porphyry pillars instead of jewels, and written within and without in letters of enamel and gold" (10.112). Ruskin later adds: "I have above spoken of the whole church as a great Book of Common Prayer; the mosaics were its illuminations, and the common people of the time" [continued below]