In a fragmentary preface to St. Mark's Rest, now in Princeton University's Firestone Library, Ruskin gives a brief history of his Venetian experiences, emphasizing the reading that conditioned his early responses to the city that proved so important to his life and work:

My father had trained me well in Shakespeare I knew the Two Gentlemen, & the Merchants of Verona and Venice, better than any gentlemen or merchants in London. had learned most of Romeo and Juliet, by heart; and all the beautiful beginnings of Othello. From Byron though with less reverence, I had received even deeper impressions – nor can I to this day be enough thankful for the glorious ideal of Venetian womanhood and Venetian patriotism which he gave me in Faliero and the Foscari, as I became capable of receiving it in later years Add to these Rogers poems, with Turner Vignettes – and Shelleys Julian & Maddalo, Prouts drawings in the Watercolour Rooms of its Old Society and the list of my first tutors in Venetian work will be full.

The clean and the proper (in the sense of incorporated and incorporable) becomes filthy, the sought-after turns into the banished, fascination into shame.—Julia Kristeva, The Powers of HorrorTHE HISTORY WE ARE SKETCHING is one of boundaries double crossed between India and the West and between periods of the South Asian past. On one level our story is about an historical irony, how late nineteenth-century Orientalism resuscitated the romantic mystique of the eastern dancer in the West just as South Indian dancers were being repressed in their homeland by Indian reformers influenced by western mores. Within that history there is another dynamic that is less about crossing than about shifting boundaries, boundaries between the sacred and the profane and their expression in colonial law. We will be looking at these movements and transformations within the context of current scholarship that is historicizing even those elements of Indian culture conventionally understood to be most ancient and unchanging.