John Ruskin, the polymathic Victorian art and social critic, started out as an Evangelical chauvinist, celebrating the works of a school of British artists he described as his “Modern Painters”, especially J.M.W.Turner. But his developing interest in European architecture and art, centrally in Venice, challenged his provinciality and opened his imagination to the treasures of the Catholic Middle Ages and the society from which they had sprung. Throughout his winding and contradictory history of religious faith and doubt he persisted in arguing his belief that “all great art is praise”, and seeing it with the eyes of “faith and intense Christian feeling”.