Chapter VIII (3)

On the other hand, there seem to be at least two points which make strongly in favour of the later date which has been given to the twelve northern arches of the Piazzetta-front. These are, first, that all the eight capitals which are replicas are in this northern part of the front, and none of them in the first six arches from the south-west angle; and, secondly, that the plate armour in the sculpture above the capital of the north-east angle (Judgment of Solomon) is later in date than the period which I assume for this work, and later than the chain mail shown in the third and eighth capitals of the sea-front. To the first objection a sufficient answer is that some of the best of the capitals to these twelve arches are of original design--not replicas; and in reply to the last objection (which is of much force) the only, but at the same time obvious reply is, that the Trajan capital, just under this late armour, is one of the most beautiful of the entire series, and that on the whole it is much more likely that some of the sculpture was left in block and finished later, than that no difference should be made in any of the mouldings or details of the work of two periods. There is indeed some, though not very strong, evidence that the sculpture of this capital is not earlier than about 1423. There is, according to Zanotto, an inscription on it, “╋ Duo Soci Florentini incise,” and he argues from the use of this last word, that the two men were the same who made the monument to the Doge Tommaso Mocenigo in 1423, in which, according to Sansovino, they used the same unusual term “inciserunt;” this interpretation of the inscription is the more allowable in that, as I have said, the details of armour in themselves suggest a date not much earlier than this for the sculpture connected with it on the angle just above the cap. This date of course brings this work to very nearly the same period as that of the execution of the Porta della Carta, and it has been assumed by some that these capitals were the work of the Bons who built it. Such an assertion is as wild as that of M. Didron, who says something as to their belonging to the thirteenth century, for the very shortest inspection of the Porta della Carta would convince the most sceptical that no part of the capitals could have been executed by any of the men who wrought at it. In comparing the merits of the carvers of the earliest and the latest capitals, it is due to the latter to say that one of the finest of the whole series is this Trajan capital at the north-west angle, and there is no internal evidence in it which could lead one to suppose it to be the work of a man who would ever condescend to copy another’s work.

No one can examine the building without seeing that there is not only in the detail, but equally in the general design, a marked difference between the two lower stages and the upper stage. In place of the extreme boldness which marks every part of the former, we see mouldings reduced in the latter to the smallest and meanest section possible; the windows of the upper stage are badly designed, whilst the traceries of the second stage are as fine as they can possibly be; the angle-shafts of the upper stage are of the latest type, elaborately twisted and violently defined, instead of being merely delicate roundings off of the hard line of wall, as all the early Venetian angle-shafts are; the parapet, too, is not equal in its design to any of the lower work, and crowns with an insignificant grotesqueness the noble symmetry of the two lower arcades; and finally, the chequer-work of marble which forms the whole of the upper wall is a mode of construction which I have not seen in any early work, though it is seen in the Porta della Carta (A.D. 1429), and in one other late work, the Palazzo in the Campo Sta. Maria Mater Domini.[49]

Looking at all the circumstances of the case, I think the fairest explanation of them is, that the whole sea-front and the six arches of the Piazzetta (columns 1 to 24 on the plan) were first built, that the extension to the north (columns 25 to 36 on plan) was then immediately undertaken by the same artists, and finally that the whole upper story was built and the sculpture of its capitals completed before 1423. The capitals of the lower arcade were probably sculptured by degrees, and certainly not by one hand, between the years 1310 and 1361.

There is a confirmation to some extent of this view in a MS. in the Bodleian Library of the fourteenth century (the Romance of Alexander), which contains a curious contemporary view of Venice. This drawing has been engraved at p. 26 of the second volume of the ‘Domestic Architecture of the Middle Ages;’[50] here it will be seen, with the usual amount of licence which characterizes most mediæval

From the Romance of Alexander.

Page 204.]

representations of places or towns, that it has nevertheless been intended as an absolute representation of what its draughtsman had seen. The columns with S. Theodore and the lion of S. Mark on their capitals, the bronze horses and the domes of S. Mark’s, the position by the waterside, and the representation of the Ponte di Paglia, are all proofs of this; but the important point for my present purpose is, that he drew the Ducal Palace as _a building of two stories in height_--the first a simple arcade, the second an arcade with tracery. In the distance behind this, his drawing shews a picturesque assemblage of buildings, whilst figures are represented behind the upper arcade as though it were only a kind of immense balcony. There can be no doubt whatever that this old drawing tells in favour of the view that the upper stage was not built until after a considerable interval; for it is almost impossible--looking at the way in which the rest of the drawing is made--to believe that all reference to it would have been omitted, had it been in existence at the time the artist saw it.

It will be seen that my supposition that the original design of the Ducal Palace was of considerably less elevation than the present building, would tend to make it very much more like the Byzantine type than it is; but even now no one can dispute the family likeness. The amount of constructive art is as nearly as possible the same. The weight is supported by a succession of shafts placed at very short intervals from each other, and in neither is there any approach to the system of pier, arch, and buttress, so distinctive of Gothic art in the North of Europe. The pointed arch is used, it is true, in the palace; but, after all, the mere use of the pointed arch does not make thorough pointed architecture, and therefore, interesting as it is as a variety of the style, the Ducal Palace is, I think, not properly to be placed in the first class of Gothic buildings. Indeed, the second stage, whose exquisite beauty is the charm of the whole building, does not exhibit the pointed arch at all in a properly developed form, and is strong enough to support the great weight of wall above, only by reason of the massy character of its tracery, and not by the proper application of constructional arches. I have already said that there is no approach to buttressing; but the angles require some help, and this is given partly by increasing considerably the size of the shafts, and partly by iron ties at the springing of the arches running for some distance in each direction from the angles.

All the mouldings are very simple; they are generally composed of three-quarter beads, small fillets, and large flat hollows, constantly arranged in the same order. The label of the main arcade is a plain bead. In the string-courses boldly-carved flowers are repeated with a slight interval between each, and the upper string-course has a row of nail-heads in one of its members. The cusping of the tracery is quite square in its section, and the cusps finish with a square end, to which is attached--and with good effect--a small circular ball of red marble. The parapet is of the somewhat peculiar kind I have already mentioned, and I confess I have never been long enough in Venice to accustom myself to, or to admire, its extreme peculiarity of both outline and design.

And now before we leave this subject let me offer a remark, as every one who writes on it must, on the admirable story of these sculptures. I have never sat in front of one of them for any space of time without seeing some wayfarer stop to study the story of some one of the capitals. They are a book at which more thousands have looked with pleasure for some five hundred years than at any other single book in the world, with the one exception of the Bible. And the lesson to architects is obvious. Concentrate your labour and your story on some one part of your building where all men may read it; tell some simple story and you will interest your readers, if you will but tell it so simply that by good chance they may be able to read it. Lay out a scheme so well that if you die your successor may carry it on. Here, as I believe, the architect completed his two stages of arcades, whilst the sculptor was changed, but kept generally to the scheme of subjects first of all laid down. At the three exposed angles are the three archangels, below them the moral lesson--as much wanted now as then--of the Drunkenness of Noah, and the Story of Tobit (with S. Raphael); at another angle The Fall (under S. Michael); and at the last the Judgment of Solomon (under S. Gabriel). In the lower range of capitals the stories and catalogues of virtues and vices; the illustrations of fruits, animals, every-day life; the labours of the months, trades, sciences, and arts--are all illustrated, and complete a cycle of subjects which, ill-treated, would always have a certain value, and which, well treated as most of them are here, have the very highest charm.

For a building which owes its general impressiveness entirely to the uniform character of its architecture, it is especially fortunate that there should be so much also in the detail to attract and reward constant and minute examination. It is for this reason that the range of great capitals to the columns of the lower arcade is of so much importance. They are so large, so close to the eye, so interesting in their story, and on the whole so carefully and artistically executed, as to afford the greater pleasure the more the building is known. The key-plan to these capitals which I give[51] will be useful to shew what the general arrangement of the subjects is. I have already shewn that there are repetitions of many of the subjects, but it is equally worth notice that the foliage which forms the framework for the subjects is also repeated. There are, I think, only four varieties in its arrangement. In the first the capitals are arranged very simply--in some cases rudely--with tufts of foliage or heads. The capitals numbered 2, 3, 6, 13, 16, 20, 23, 27, and 34, are examples of this. In the next the foliage of the lower part grows up vertically, bending slightly out to support the sculptured subjects. These are generally the most graceful of all, and infinitely richer in effect than the first class. The capitals numbered 1, 7, 9, 12, 18, 24, 26, 28, 33, and 36, are examples of these. In the third class the foliage is generally marked by the same feeling, but it rises vertically to the angles, and curls over under the subject; the 19th and 25th capitals are examples of this class. In the fourth class the foliage curves over downwards, both at the angles and under the subject. The neckings below the capitals are wrought on the shaft itself. They are sometimes moulded, sometimes corded, and sometimes delicately carved with foliage; these last are by very much the more beautiful, and generally accompany the best wrought of the capitals, whilst the inferior capitals have, in all cases, the plainer necking.

The capitals in the upper arcade have not so much story as those below. They have generally a head on each side in the midst of foliage, and are square in plan, though the lower caps are octagonal--a few only have their names written over them; but on the ground-story most of the capitals have, or have had, explanatory inscriptions. Some of the upper capitals close to the north-west angle are among the best. The curves of the foliage in the angles of the capitals are admirably wrought, and may be compared, to the damage of the latter, with some of the lower capitals in the sea-front. The upper range of capitals gradually deteriorates from the north-west angle as you go to the south-east. These last are really very bad, having rude gross carving of the human figure, and foliage feebly massed and treated; but the upper capital of the south-west angle with the figures of the four winds, and the two or three capitals near it, must be excepted from this remark, being superb in design and execution.

The remains of original work in the quadrangle are much less important. The arcade on the first floor remains, but none of its details are good, and on the east side it is a poor Renaissance copy of the other sides. The whole of the lower arcade has been destroyed or altered. But in the upper walls, which are faced with brick, some of the original windows remain; they are small, but of the same sort of detail and character as the larger windows in the outer walls.

The building has lost much by the gradual raising of the pavement. This is now about twenty inches above the old base of the columns, and their proportions are so far altered for the worse. And it has lost immensely also by the destruction of the inlaid marble which once filled all the spandrels of the main arcade. Two panels only of these remain, and both in the sea-front. They are charmingly designed, inclosing circles which exactly touch the labels and strings.

Of the modern additions to this grand building I shall not say anything. They are not beautiful in themselves nor interesting by reason of their decorations, if I except those walls on which Tintoretto has lavished so much of his skill. The architects of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were artists in very deed, and it is with their work only that I can feel any real sympathy.

Such, then, is the Ducal Palace: a building certainly in some respects of almost unequalled beauty, but at the same time of unequal merit; its first and second stages quite perfect in their bold nervous character, and in the almost interminable succession of the same beautiful features in shaft and arch and tracery, forming perhaps one of the grandest proofs in the world of the exceeding value of perfect regularity and of a repetition of good features in architecture, when it is possible to obtain it on a very large scale.

Leaving the Piazzetta, and stepping into the gondola which has been waiting for us hard by, let us now go in search of other palaces; but let us not imagine that we are to see anything equal to the Ducal Palace. There is, it appears to me, a great gap between it and all other Venetian buildings; and yet all others seem to have been founded on it, or on the buildings out of which it grew. Their traceries, seldom absolutely alike, have still so much general similarity that at first one may well fancy that there is no variety at all; and, as I have before said, the general arrangement of their windows and doors is so nearly identical, that this impression is the more likely to grow upon the mind.

We will not attempt to take the buildings as they come; but rather as we think of them, and to some extent in the order of their merit, let us note down a few of the glories of the domestic work of Venice. And first let us stop in this narrow canal, for we have by our side one of the most exquisite little pieces of detail in the whole city. It is an archway, simple and delicate in its proportions, lovely as it is simple, and appropriately placed hard by the bridge called “del Paradiso.” I trust that my sketch is clear enough to shew how pure and good the work is. The main points to be noted are the characteristic flatness of the details, and the line of dentil-moulding, which defines all the leading architectural features, originally invented for borders of incrustations at S. Mark’s, and here, as everywhere in Venice, used for decoration afterwards. The incrusted circles of marble on each side of the figure give great life to the spandrel beneath the arch, and the windows seen behind shew us a late example of the not unfrequent

use of the semicircular and ogee arches together in the same window.

Another precious fragment--the Palazzo San Giorgio, I believe--is reached from the land side by passing under an arch somewhat similar to that on the Ponte del Paradiso. This arch is turned between the upper stories of two houses at the end of a _calle_ properly yclept “dell’ arco detto bon,” and is finished with a steep gable. Beyond it is seen a fragment of wall veneered with marble, with the upper part of an early two-light window, and two circular medallions; and above this a piece of wall veneered in diamonds of red and white marble--so far as I know, a unique example of such a treatment. The window-head is of that earliest form of ogee, a circle just turned up to a point in the centre, which has so manifestly an Eastern origin, and which must not be confounded in date with our English ogee arches.

In another, and rather desolate, canal in the outskirts of the city, wider than usual, and with a footpath at the side of the water, instead of having the walls of the houses running down into it, and forming its boundary, is the Palazzo Cicogna, which I remember gratefully because it is one of the few exceptions to the general rule of regularity. The whole design of this building is very irregular: a detached shaft at one angle supports a portion of the house which overhangs and forms a sort of open passage-way; to the right of this opening is a four-light shafted window, and then a plain wall pierced with two windows, each of a single ogee trefoiled light. The upper story has two single windows over the others, whilst over the larger windows and the passage-way is a large window conspicuous from its size and the peculiarity of its tracery. It is of six lights divided by very good shafts, and properly arched with pure and good trefoiled arches; above these, and inclosed within the perpetual indented or billeted string-course, is a complicated system of intersecting circles pierced at regular intervals with quatrefoils. The section of this upper part is very much thinner than that of the arches beneath. This window is in a most shaken and decayed state, and not likely, I fear, to be long preserved. The whole elevation is finished with a shallow cornice supported on corbels.

A doorway on the Ponte San Tomà is quite worthy of a visit. It has the usual square opening of reddish marble, and above this is a pointed arch of moulded brick; the tympanum is filled in with a square carved centre panel, and the ground beyond this with quatrefoils of brick or tile very prettily disposed, and quite deserving of illustration.

And now let us go back to the Grand Canal; we shall enter it by the side of the Palazzo Foscari, which, with two other contiguous palaces, occupies quite the post of honour at the bottom of the principal reach of the canal, and commands the whole view of its noble and ever-busy way to where the arch of the Rialto and another bend in the canal close in the view. We will go a few strokes only towards the Rialto, and then turn round to look at the palaces we have just passed. They certainly form a most magnificent group, and are in every way worthy of their conspicuous position. The palace at the junction of the two waters is that of the Foscari; the others belonged, I believe, to two of the Giustiniani family; and but a few yards up the canal, which runs by the side of the former, is one of the smaller remnants of Byzantine work already referred to. This group is so well known as scarcely to need any description--suffice it to say, therefore, that throughout these palaces the windows are shafted, and the glass is fixed in wooden frames behind the stonework. This is beyond all doubt what we ought to do; it is the only sensible and rational mode of adapting the system of traceried and shafted windows for domestic purposes, and

has here, as elsewhere, the prestige of ancient authority to recommend it to the consideration of those amongst us who will do nothing without it. I have enlarged on this point elsewhere, and will, therefore, say no more upon it now, save that in Venice such a thing as an English monial ordinarily is, was never known. Windows were invariably shafted from the earliest period to the latest, and so far invariably of the highest order, inasmuch as they admitted of the definite expression of the point at which the monial terminated and the arch commenced, and inasmuch, too, as the coloured surface of the detached marble shaft must ever be far more lovely than the lines of tracery mouldings carried down even to the sill.

The angle-shafts of the Palazzo Foscari have caps and bases in each stage of the building; those of the other palaces continue up without interruption.

The date of the smaller palaces, and probably of the large one also, is very early in the fifteenth century; and the latter had, in 1574, the honour of being the grandest palace that the Venetians could find in which to lodge Henry III. of France. They are all three very similar in their design. Their water-gates are pointed, and the windows in the water-stage small and unimportant. The second stage is more important, and has cusped ogee window-heads and balconies. The third stage is, however, the _piano nobile_, all the windows having deep traceried heads and large balconies. The fourth stage is very nearly like the first, save that instead of balconies there is a delicate balustrading between the shafts of the windows, which is very frequent in good Venetian work, and always very pretty in its effect. All the windows in these three palaces have ogee-heads generally finished with carved finials, and inclosed within a square outline formed by the small dentilled moulding, and giving what I have before had to refer to--to some extent the effect of a panel with a window pierced in it, veneered on the front. The Foscari Palace is the only one of these three that has any string-courses. The arrangement of the windows--large in the centre and smaller at the sides--is so nearly regular and of a sort of two-and-two kind of uniformity, that one scarcely notices that nevertheless, when internal arrangements make it necessary, a departure from this strict rule is allowed.

The back entrance to the Foscari Palace is on the side canal. It is of some interest as retaining, in a very perfect state, an example of a very picturesque treatment in brick of the Venetian battlement. This consists of a series of piers finished with a steep gabled outline, and pierced with trefoiled openings. A good example of this sort of battlement remained near the Fondaco de’ Turchi, and deserves illustration. It is quite a Venetian invention, and errs on the side of quaintness.

In a small courtyard, desolate and dreary, reached after crossing the Ponte di Paglia and one or two other bridges on the Riva dei Schiavoni, is the Palazzo Badoer, a fourteenth-century palace, the ogeed arches of the windows in which are more than usually good; whilst the beauty of the central window, inclosed within a square line of moulding, within which the wall is incrusted with marble relieved by medallions, is very great. The structure of this, as of most Venetian palaces, is brick which has been frescoed; but it is now in a very lamentable state of decay. The balconies of the lower windows are clearly modern, but there is a trace of the original balustrade between the shafts of the windows in the second stage; and in front of the side-lights to the upper window is a grille of iron-work taking the place of a balcony, and composed of a combination of quatrefoils. The arrangement of the windows in this front is not absolutely regular, but still the centre is very marked; and though it is of early date, the true use of the arch nowhere appears. The usual[52] dog-tooth cornice finishes the walls under the eaves. In the courtyard of this house are two of the wells which give so much character to all the courts in Venice. They appear generally to be of early date, and look, frequently, like the capitals of large columns, taken down and placed upon the ground. Those in front of the Palazzo Badoer are perhaps more like fonts.

Another palace, also said to belong to one of the Badoer family, placed at the junction of two canals very near the Scuola di San Giorgio and the Greek Church, is remarkable as being now one of the very few houses in which the red brick walls are still in their original state, and not defiled by compo, paint, or whitewash. This house has three fronts, with one old doorway on the canal, and two on the land. The back facing the Campo San Severo has an unusually fine and lofty entrance, a square doorway with a pointed arch above (which I suppose once held tracery), and a group of five windows with circles or disks of marble in their spandrels above. Amongst other things it is remarkable as an instance of the way in which windows were sometimes placed absolutely at the very angles of the building. Judging by the similarity of its tracery to that above the Porta della Carta in the Ducal Palace, this angle window must date from about 1400 to 1430. It has a very bold shaft at the angle, whilst the jambs have pilasters ornamented at their angles by a twisted cord-like moulding, which is frequently met with in the later work. There is a small angle-shaft elaborately twisted just above this window, and very much like the angle-shafts of the Ducal Palace.

The composition of the main window in the front of this house is, I think, very striking. The lower window of four lights (one of which is larger and loftier than the others--a curious instance of the junction of regularity with irregularity), and whose arches are ogee trefoils, is surmounted by another window of four lights, with delicate balustrading between the shafts; and on each side of this upper window, and forming part of the composition, is a single light, with projecting balcony. The effect of the whole arrangement is pleasing, and is frequently repeated in other palaces. The marble incrustation over this window is very much like that in the other Palazzo Badoer; and from the centre of the medallions of marble small balls of marble project, fixed with metal, and giving great life and beauty to the medallions, and I think without any sacrifice of truth. The main fabric of this building must be of the latter part of the fourteenth century--the arches of the principal window being of a very excellent though simple type. Venetian balconies, of which this palace affords such good examples, are very beautiful and very characteristic. Nowhere else are they seen in such perfection; nowhere else, perhaps, were they ever so absolutely necessary. The palaces rose out of the dark water which washed against their foundations, and no ground

could be given up for shady arcades as in other Italian cities, nor were there any paths to be strolled along; the only resource was, therefore, to gain from the air that which the land could not afford, and by projections in front of the windows to obtain that power of enjoying the delicious evening atmosphere, so cool and pleasant after the fatigues of the too sultry day. These balconies are almost always very similar, consisting of a number of delicate shafts with carved capitals, supporting a piece of stone whose under side is notched up in a series of trefoils (generally ogee), resting upon the capitals of the shafts. These are divided occasionally by pilasters, under which are corbels jutting out boldly to support their weight; and above which sit, generally, quietly and placidly eyeing the gondolas as they shoot silently by, small lions, dogs, or other animals--a quaint finish which one soon learns to like; their angles are often marked by corded mouldings, and the edges of their floors and copings are almost always moulded and specked with the perpetual notchings of the nail-head, and their under sides or soffeits are frequently carved or panelled.

There was great variety in the planning of these balconies. In the Palazzo Persico, for instance, in which the central windows of the second and third stages form one great panel, the lower balcony is continuous across all four lights of the window, whilst the outer lights only of the upper window have balconies, the two middle lights having instead a balustrade between their shafts. In other cases the balconies extend to four lights only of a six-light window, whilst in most they are confined to the central windows, to which they give much additional dignity. The Ca’ Fasan affords an almost solitary example[53] of tracery in a balcony; and the effect of this is so vastly inferior to the usual shafted balconies, that it seems scarcely necessary to pause to consider why it should be so. Obviously, however, it is not very convenient to have the fretful points of cusps and traceries set, as it were, to catch every projection or point of your dress whenever you lean over the edge of the balcony to inhale the fresh air or scan the busy scene below.

In the Casa Persico, to which reference has already been made, the central window is an elaborate composition of the same kind; but the lower one is of more importance, and has a continuous balcony; and here I may notice the finials with which the ogee arches of Venetian windows are so often finished. They appeared to me to be invariably tasteless and poor in execution, and very mean in their outline. I did not see one finial in Venice which was satisfying, even when found in conjunction with otherwise fine work; and I used to wish heartily, when I reached some palace not before seen, that I might find its arches finished without them. There was some reason for the wish, too, in the fact that it is in the later work that these tasteless ornaments are commonest. I saw them first at Verona, and lamented over them there, but at Venice I was positively annoyed by the persevering and endless thrusting of their poverty and badness upon my wearied eyes.

And now let us go again into the Grand Canal, and we shall not have gone very far up the broad water above the Rialto before we shall find, on our right hand, one of the most striking groups of mediæval palaces and houses which can be seen anywhere, even in Venice; this is where the famous Ca’ d’Oro unites with some three or four other houses, of rather earlier date, and gives a very fair idea of what the water-scenery of the ancient city once was. There is some difficulty in criticizing the Ca’ d’Oro, because, in the first place, it has been restored to render it fit for the occupation of Mdlle. Taglioni; and, in the next place, much of the elaborate decoration from which it derived its name, has perished or been destroyed. As it is, however, it is still a very sumptuous example of the later fourteenth-century Gothic. Its whole face is inlaid with squares of red and white marble, and a great amount of carving is spread over the entire surface, round and between the windows. This is very flat, but good in its effect. The arcade on the water-story, and the traceried arcades above, all open into recessed courts--an arrangement peculiar, I think, among Gothic houses, and similar in its purpose to the arcades in the Byzantine palaces. Some of the balconies are good, and the carving of the capitals and moulding of the window-traceries are very characteristic of Venetian pointed. The whole design is one-sided, and gives the impression of a house to which an additional wing has been added. The water-stage consists of an open arcade of five arches, the central arch round, the remainder pointed, and on one side of these are two windows with a continuous balcony. The second and third stages have, above the five open arches, elaborately traceried windows, of no less than eight lights in width, filling almost the entire front, the outside lights having balconies, whilst the others have balustrading. Over the two windows of the water-stage are single-light windows in each stage. There are throughout this front many medallions of dark marble, which, let into a field of light marble, are most brilliant in their effect.

The most remarkable features in the Ca’ d’Oro are, however, the triple and elaborately carved and chevroned angle-shafts, which I have nowhere else seen,[54] and the very singular parapet. The height of this is greater about the centre and at the two ends than elsewhere; but this appears to have been done rather with the intention of carrying up to the very top the noticeable division in the building itself than for any other reason. A very small portion only of the parapet is perfect, and this it is rather difficult to get at. The small balls of marble affixed to the outer edge of the trefoils are like those in the tracery of the Ducal Palace, and in the centre of the medallions of marble everywhere throughout the city. Their effect is certainly very piquant.

By the side of the Ca’ d’Oro there are three ancient houses of considerable interest, and the second from the Ca’ d’Oro,

the Palazzo Segredo, was a very good example indeed; it has unhappily, I believe, all been restored and painted, so that now few would believe that it could ever have been (as it was) one of the very best works in Venice of its age. It quite deserves illustration, on account of the extreme vigour and beauty of its great window, which has more of the flavour of the arcade in the Doge’s Palace, than anything else in Venice. These three houses are all more than usually irregular in the arrangement of their windows.

Lower down the Grand Canal, and nearly opposite the Post-office, is the Palazzo Pisani-Moretta--a very late building, in which all the balconies are Renaissance, with ordinary balustrading; but this occurs so often in connection with the latest examples of Gothic work, that I am disposed to believe that they were possibly, after all, contemporary in their erection. This palace, too, is remarkable for its double entrance-doors, with ogee arches, and for the manner in which the central window is carried up in an uninterrupted way to the very cornice; the lower traceries being very fair, those in the upper story very weak and bad.

The Palazzo Falcanon (alla Riva Tonda) is another fine house. It has two water-gates; is four stories in height, the third being the principal floor; the angle shafts are all spiral, and the string-courses all ornamented with cable mouldings, which, as is usual, are twisted in reverse ways from the centre of the front.

The Palazzo Celsi, near the Frari, is, like the Badoer Palace, an example of a fine regularly designed house with its brickwork left in its natural state; and the Palazzo Orfei is an instance of the finest (and a very fine) front being turned towards a _campo_ and not towards a canal. The long group of mediæval houses which formed one side of the Campo Sta. Maria Formosa was equally worthy of admiration, but has lately been modernized--a fate which is only too rapidly overtaking most of what one used to admire in this once fortunately neglected city!

The window of which I give an illustration, on the Ponte del Fornaro, is a rare but extremely good example of the combination of sculpture and tracery. Here the carvings are good examples of the emblems of the four Evangelists very ingeniously treated, and the whole window has more force than most of the traceried windows.

With notices of two more buildings, the Palazzi Cavalli and Barbaro, I shall conclude my remarks upon the existing examples of Venetian domestic work. Neither of them calls for much remark. The traceries of the Cavalli Palace are heavy and unsatisfactory, and contrast unfavourably with the greater simplicity of the windows in the Palazzo Barbaro. The two palaces stand, however, in a very fine position on the Grand Canal, commanding the view from the Foscari Palace in one direction to the church of the Salute and the mouth of the canal in the other. Nearly opposite them is a very striking house, the Ca’ Dario, built, I imagine, about the commencement of the sixteenth century, before the revived Classic feeling had fully possessed the Venetians, and displaying some effective and beautiful arrangements of constructional decoration with coloured marbles. It is, in fact, an attempt to revive, to some extent, the art of incrustation, as practised at S. Mark’s; and so successful is it, that I wonder much that more examples are not met with.

In the Grand Canal, and near this spot, are many other buildings, all worthy of illustration, but adding, I think, nothing to what we already know. The Ca’ Fasan is the most unlike the other mediæval houses of any; but it pleased me so little that I could not bring myself to waste time by sketching it. It is only fair to say that in its traceried balconies it approaches more nearly to the latest

northern pointed than any other building in Venice, and that it has perhaps at the same time less breadth and dignity than any.

Two fine palaces[55] are now turned into hotels, and that at which I stopped was full of remains of pointed windows; indeed traces of pointed work are singularly plentiful, and I might go on to an interminable length were I to attempt to describe them all. The Arsenal is old, I believe, but has been modernized. It may be visited now for the sake of the grand and quaint old lions which sit before its entrance.

Of the interiors of these houses I cannot say very much. They usually have a great hall in the centre of each floor, into which the various rooms open; and the windows of these halls are generally the most important in the elevation. The frames of the windows were of wood, placed behind the traceries, and the original ceilings were the moulded beams of the floors. I have only seen one good Gothic staircase in Venice. This is in the Casa Goldoni, and has for its balustrade a series of shafts with piers at intervals. Its detail in short is that of the balcony, but sloped up to suit the rise of the steps. Pointed arches of brick carry the steps. This house may well be visited by other than architectural pilgrims, and will be found near the Ponte San Tomà. A fine early Renaissance staircase remains in the Palazzo Minelli, near San Paterniano. This is circular, with continuous open arcades following the rise of the steps, the usual shafted balustrade filling the lower part of the openings between the columns. The chimneys of these palaces are very singular. Not many old examples remain, but they are still copied, and that some of them are really old is proved by the extent to which they are shown in early Venetian paintings, as e.g. in the works of Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio. In my illustration the examples Figs. 2 and 3 are copied from paintings, and Fig. 1 is from a palace near the Ponte Bernardo.

_fig. 1_ _fig. 2_ _fig. 3_]

And now that we have so far passed in review a series of the finest remains of mediæval architecture in Venice, it is time to inquire how much is to be learnt by what we have seen, and in what degree it differs from the developments of pointed architecture with which we are familiar in Northern Europe.

I think the very first point to be observed is that in Venice architecture was never essentially constructional in the sense in which it was in our own land. The pointed arch is rarely used except in churches, and in its place traceries, increased in size and scale to do their work, are made to carry the entire weight of walling above them, as is the case, to take the foremost example, in the second stage of the Ducal Palace. And it is remarkable that, when the arch was used, from a very early date it was the ogee arch, and not the arch formed by two simple curves; indeed it may almost be said that the pure pointed arch was never used, save where it would have been quite impossible with any other contrivance to bridge the necessary gap, or provide sufficiently for the weight to be supported. How striking a contrast this is to the way in which in England men worked with and exhibited the pointed arch, evidently as if, and because, they loved it!--using it not only as a sturdy servant to do heavy work, but as the friend of whose friendship they were ever the most anxious to boast. I do not complain of the flatness and lack of breaks or recesses in the masses of the great Venetian buildings, because this no doubt arose in part from the value of every foot of ground so hardly gathered from the sea, and the difficulty of throwing out buttresses into the narrow depths of the canals out of which they rise. And the same conditions which enforced this flatness are grateful because they involved the charming balconies which are so peculiarly Venetian, and gave a breadth and simplicity to the outline which has its own artistic charm.

In the science of moulding I cannot but think that it is quite useless to compare works executed for the sunny skies of Venice with those fitted for the gloomy sunlessness of a northern climate. The one kind are as properly soft, gentle in their alternations of light and shade, and delicate, as the other are piquant and sharp, rejoicing in the dark shade of deep hollows and endless intricacy of outline and arrangement. But I feel no doubt whatever that, unfair as it may be to compare one school with the other, seeing that each worked for its own wants, it is yet most clear that the Northern architects were developing a much deeper art, and working with much more consummate skill, than were the Venetian. The endless variety of the arrangement of; capitals, and the necessary grouping of mouldings to fit, their varying outlines, was carried to the extreme point of perfection by the one school, whilst in the other not only was there much less depth and relief, but also very much less variety. The abacus of the Italian capital was almost always square in plan, and, as an almost necessary consequence of this, mouldings retained very much the same arrangement and shape for the whole period of the prevalence of the pointed style, and generally rather leaned to the side of heaviness than of delicacy. Venetian mouldings are composed of the constant combination of a three-quarter bead and a shallow hollow, divided by small fillets, and so invariably arranged in almost exactly the same order, that it requires very great care to decide upon the date of buildings by their mouldings with any sort of approach to certainty.

In addition to simple mouldings, there are also the ever-recurring ornamented mouldings which are so peculiarly characteristic of Venetian works of all dates. These consist generally of sections which in England we should consider Romanesque, but which in Venice appear to be much more common in the latest works than in the earliest; chevrons, cable-mouldings, billets, and the like, are seen everywhere, and suggest the question whether this class of ornamented mouldings, so largely used in the early days of architecture in England and so little afterwards, might not with some advantage be rescued from the contempt into which it has fallen with modern builders. They have the advantage of being within the power of any ordinary workman to execute, and do not, therefore, require the handiwork, which is so rare and so precious, of thoroughly good carvers. Add to this, that some features originally invented for use in the way of holding together marble incrustations, were afterwards used universally for their own sakes as ornamental mouldings, for which office they were in no way fitted, and I think nearly as much has been said as can be of Venetian mouldings in stone. Those in brick are even less satisfactory; but they occur mainly about the churches, and, as I do not recognize anything at all distinctively Venetian in their design or arrangement, it will be better to say more about them after we have seen the brickwork in other cities in the North of Italy, compared with which that at Venice is not of the first order.

In the practice of carving, as in that of moulding, I see no reason for yielding the palm to the Venetian. It is true indeed, that the Byzantine capitals--of which such magnificent examples exist at S. Mark’s--are some of the most exquisite I have ever seen, true and precise in their sculpture, revelling in the utmost delicacy of intricate work, and always refined and elaborated with great evidence of care and thoughtfulness; but after the earliest school, and those later examples in which they were copied and regarded as models, there appears to me to be much less to admire. There is a confusion and want of fixed purpose about many of those which are commonly referred to as the best types of Gothic sculpture, which is at best not satisfactory; and I confess that I came away much more pleased with some of the Byzantine capitals than with any others. They have some notable points of difference from those to which we are used. They are generally much larger in proportion to the shaft than ours; and instead of having a regular neck-moulding, they rise out of the shaft with a kind of swell, which, as being less definite, is to me less satisfactory than our neck-moulding. The capitals of all dates are very generally similar in their outlines--this in part arising from the constant occurrence of circular columns with capitals whose abaci are square, and in part from the imitation, more or less closely, of Byzantine models. Indeed, it is impossible not to see how great an influence the earliest remaining work--that of the eleventh century--had in Venice until the end of the fourteenth and far into the fifteenth century; the most beautiful and striking arrangements of the former age are reproduced and only slightly modified in the finest work of the latter to a very remarkable extent: and so much more decidedly and frequently than are the traces, in northern pointed, of any hankering after the features of Romanesque buildings, that I think but one conclusion can fairly be drawn from the sculpture of Venice as well as from its architecture, viz. that pointed architecture was never developed as purely and thoroughly in Venice as in the North of Europe; and that, though it retained its sway there nearly as long as it did elsewhere, it never thoroughly understood or felt its own strength, and worked and toiled tied down and encumbered by Byzantine fetters and Classic sympathies. There is much, notwithstanding this, to admire--and, above all else, the greatest beauty of the style, wherein it so far left us behind, the thorough appreciation and unsparing use of the shaft. It is quite astonishing how very little this was ever used in England. Occasionally, indeed, it was freely used in grand buildings, and in some individual features it was frequently seen in thirteenth-century buildings; but at the very period when, if ever, architecture was in its perfection--in the early part of the fourteenth century--it was almost entirely forgotten and thrown aside. All honour, therefore, to the men who so perseveringly and determinedly used it as did the builders at Venice for three centuries! And all shame to us if we do not attempt for the future so far at any rate to follow in their steps! So rare are any but shafted windows in Venice, that at present I hardly remember a single instance of a window with monials formed by the continuous mouldings of the tracery; and it is obvious that this gave occasion, not only to the use of beautiful marbles--never so well used as in shafts--but also to the constant use of carved capitals. In domestic buildings, as I have before remarked, this arrangement of shafted windows is very valuable, because it suggests one obvious way in which we may unite traceried windows with the very newest arrangement of window-frames or sashes in the most comfortable nineteenth-century houses; for in these Venetian palaces the glass was always contained in a separate wooden frame set within the marble shafts and tracery.[56]

Besides the use of the shaft in the ordinary way, I must not forget to say that parapets frequently (or perhaps it were better to say balustrades)--as, e.g., at S. Mark’s--and balconies everywhere, are composed of a vast number of very delicate shafts, set very close to each other, and surmounted by long pieces of stone cut out in imitation of arching, and not really to be regarded as a succession of arch-stones, but rather as coping-stones to hold the shafts together. And, again, they are used very beautifully for the support of open pinnacles, one at each angle, inclosing a figure, just as in the monuments of the Scaligers at Verona. Examples of this are to be seen in the pinnacles which have been added between the gables of S. Mark’s, which are exceedingly good in their effect; and again in the pinnacles which terminate the church of the Madonna dell’ Orto.

One more point is worthy of remark--the treatment, namely, of the angles of buildings. These were almost always marked either by a roll-moulding or by a succession of nook-shafts, sometimes extravagantly chevroned or otherwise ornamented. This, when done simply, was always satisfactory, but, in its later and more elaborate form, was, I think, as unsatisfactory. The delicate rounding off of the angles of walls was a point not unthought of in England. In the thirteenth century a nook-shaft was the common contrivance; in the fourteenth, a chamfer; and in the fifteenth men reverted entirely to the square form. Here, however, there is a great and very interesting variety in this apparently simple feature. The most satisfactory plan of all is where a quarter-circle forms the angle, and is finished with a small incision in the form of a V on either side, as it unites simplicity with strength of construction and softness of contour, and does not force itself too prominently upon our observation; and, next to this, the most satisfactory form is where, instead of the moulding being round, it is pointed at the angle. The twisted shafts of the upper stage of the Ducal Palace, and the triple and chevroned shafts of the Ca’ d’Oro, are not improvements upon the refinement of the earlier mode.