Edward Burne-Jones letter to John Ruskin, 1862 June

Burne-Jones is working on a "little head of Paolo in the Ducal Pal[ace]" for Ruskin and is anxious about the quality. (Fiona Macarthy has identified this to be a study from Veronese's Thanksgiving for the Victory of Lepanto in the Sala del Collegio. See Macarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 144.) Burne-Jones asks Ruskin to stay in Milan and not to visit "the mountain" (presumably the Alps). Burne-Jones describes his encounter with Gentile Bellini's painting of St. Mark (St. Mark Preaching in Alexandria, 1504-7) and his amazement over its detail: "it is quite as exact as a photograph, with colour besides." Burne-Jones writes of the restorations at St. Mark's: "all the R[ight] side is covered up and sealed off, it is so miserable." Burne-Jones worries that the Bellini painting soon "might be the only record of that 7th heaven." Burne-Jones ends his letter to Ruskin with, "Goodbye, of course Georgie [Georgiana Burne-Jones] who is madly in love with you sends love. We have endearing names for you which wild horses would not extort from us in confession. Ned. "

Partially reproduced in Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, vol. 1. (London: Macmillan, 1904), 245.