Editing John Ruskin (section)

===1845 tour and ''Modern Painters II'' (1846)===
Ruskin toured the continent with his parents again during 1844, visiting [[Chamonix]] and [[Paris]], studying the geology of the Alps and the paintings of [[Titian]], [[Paolo Veronese|Veronese]] and [[Perugino]] among others at the [[Louvre]]. In 1845, at the age of 26, he undertook to travel without his parents for the first time. It provided him with an opportunity to study medieval art and architecture in France, Switzerland and especially Italy. In [[Lucca]] he saw the Tomb of Ilaria del Carretto by [[Jacopo della Quercia]], which Ruskin considered the exemplar of Christian sculpture (he later associated it with the then object of his love, [[Rose La Touche]]). He drew inspiration from what he saw at the [[Camposanto Monumentale|Campo Santo]] in [[Pisa]], and in [[Florence]]. In [[Venice]], he was particularly impressed by the works of [[Fra Angelico]] and [[Giotto]] in [[San Marco|St Mark's Cathedral]], and [[Tintoretto]] in the [[Scuola di San Rocco]], but he was alarmed by the combined effects of decay and modernisation on the city: "Venice is lost to me", he wrote.<ref>Q. in Harold I. Shapiro (ed.), ''Ruskin in Italy: Letters to His Parents 1845'' (Clarendon Press, 1972), pp.200–01.</ref> It finally convinced him that architectural restoration was destruction, and that the only true and faithful action was preservation and conservation.

Drawing on his travels, he wrote the second volume of ''Modern Painters'' (published April 1846).{{sfn|Cook and Wedderburn|loc=4.25-218}} The volume concentrated on Renaissance and pre-Renaissance artists rather than on Turner. It was a more theoretical work than its predecessor. Ruskin explicitly linked the aesthetic and the divine, arguing that truth, beauty and religion are inextricably bound together: "the Beautiful as a gift of God".{{sfn|Cook and Wedderburn|loc=4.47 (''Modern Painters II'')}} In defining categories of beauty and imagination, Ruskin argued that all great artists must perceive beauty and, with their imagination, communicate it creatively by means of symbolic representation. Generally, critics gave this second volume a warmer reception, although many found the attack on the aesthetic orthodoxy associated with [[Joshua Reynolds]] difficult to accept.<ref>See J. L. Bradley (ed.), ''Ruskin: The Critical Heritage'' (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984),  pp. 88–95.</ref> In the summer, Ruskin was abroad again with his father, who still hoped his son might become a poet, even [[poet laureate]], just one among many factors increasing the tension between them.