I seem to have been stalked recently by the shade of John Ruskin, that doyen of Victorian art critics who twice became Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University.

Last month, I went to Venice and found his ghost — so to speak; not really — in the magnificent Hotel Danieli where I was lucky enough to stay. Then I came back to Oxford and there he was again, featuring prominently in The Pre-Raphaelites and Italy exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum (open until December 5, so hurry along if you have not already been).

Ruskin went to Venice with his lovely young Scottish wife Effie Gray (1828-1897), who was so beautiful that she was known as The Fair Maid of Perth, in 1849, to work on his monumental book The Stones of Venice. He wrote of his life-long love affair with the watery city: “The beginning of everything was in seeing the Gondola-beak come actually inside the door of the Danieli, when the tide was up, and the water two feet deep at the foot of the stairs.”

Interesting that there were acque alte (high waters) even then — the water was safely confined to its canal at the foot of the water entrance to the hotel when I arrived there the other day — but the shock that awaited Ruskin when he and Effie were ushered into the best suite in the lovely converted palace (room number 32) was far greater for his sensitivities than the sight of water lapping round the reception desk. When the shutters were thrown open, there was the exquisite (to my mind at least) Renaissance church of San Giorgio, designed by Andrea Palladio, shimmering away on its island in the lagoon, its perfect Classical lines as symmetrical as those on a tennis court.

He hated it, but it was not until I was back in Oxford that I began to understand why. Now I gather from the very informative catalogue of the Ashmolean exhibition that for him “it was the baleful influence of the Renaissance (in his mind, a phenomenon comparable in its impact to the British Industrial Revolution), that eliminated and made impossible the personal, the idiosyncratic, and the sincerely faithful”.

Poor Ruskin and poor Effie. From their personal points of view their sojourn in Venice that year can hardly have been accounted a success. Ruskin had married Effie, aged 19, the previous year — and then found himself “disgusted by her person”, as he later declared.

Effie later escaped the marriage to become the wife of John Everett Millais who, in 1848, had been host at the gathering of artists at which the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood — so admired by Ruskin — was founded.

Ruskin (1819-1900) was a rich man who could well afford to help and sponsor such Pre-Raphaelites as Rossetti — who lived at Kelmscott with Morris and his wife — to go to Italy. He was the son of a well to do wine merchant who imported Domecq sherry, and of a “smothering” mother. Even when he went up to Christ Church in 1836 he was not parted from his parents: his mother took lodgings in the High Street and his father visited every weekend.

At Oxford, he was appointed Professor of Fine Art twice because he resigned the chair first time round in protest against vivisection. His lectures were so popular that the first had to be presented in the Sheldonian Theatre. He also delivered several important lectures at the Ruskin School of Fine Art which he founded. And, as the Ashmolean exhibition shows, he was a very good artist himself.

But as a Palladio fan myself, sitting on my balcony at the Danieli and admiring the view, I was astonished at the vehemence of his attack on San Giorgio. He wrote: “It is impossible to conceive of a design more gross, more barbarous, more childish in conception.” And that about a building by an architect who had inspired the entire Classical tradition in British architecture.

What did he think of the Ashmolean itself, I wonder, designed along classical lines by Charles Cockerell in 1839? And what would he have thought of the clean lines of the newly-opened part, now housing this exhibition?

We will never know what he thought of Oxford’s own so-called Bridge of Sighs either, since it was built after Ruskin’s death, in 1913-14. It is loosely modelled on Venice’s Rialto Bridge, not the Bridge of Sighs at all, and was designed by that prolific Oxford architect Sir Thomas Graham Jackson (1835-1924).