Chapter VIII (2)

I must confess that on the whole, in spite of the grand size of some of them, I was rather disappointed on first seeing these buildings. One cannot but be impressed with the magnificent size of such a church as the Frari, with its many interesting details, and its monuments and woodwork. But in spite of all this, there is something wanting. I had not expected larger churches, but I had imagined that their style would be more pure, and at the same time more unlike what I was accustomed to elsewhere. The impression they left on my mind was decidedly that they were very inferior in almost every respect to churches of the same size and degree of ornament in the North of Europe, whilst in scarcely any point did they seem to me to have features which could with any advantage be imitated by us. I had allowed myself to expect a very different result, and was proportionately disappointed. There is no church in Venice--(in what I am now saying I mean always to except S. Mark’s)--comparable either to Sta. Anastasia or to the cathedral at Verona in the interior; and the exteriors, though fine as examples of the bold use of brick, are nevertheless not first-rate, nor at all superior to what one sees elsewhere.

Sta. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari ought first to be described, as being certainly the finest of its class. The first stone is said to have been laid on April 3rd, 1250, Nicola Pisano being the architect. The campanile was begun in 1361

under Jacopo Collega, and completed in 1396 by Pietro Paolo his son.

The first impression of the church on landing from the gondola on the desolate-looking piece of pavement which here, as in many of the Venetian churches, forms a court between the canal and the west front, is not pleasing. The design of the west front is nothing short of being positively ugly; it is finished with a great sham gable, with a curved outline, somewhat akin to the degraded taste of our worst Jacobæan art, and entirely without any beauty or even picturesqueness of appearance; the doorways, too, are particularly poor, consisting of a succession of twisted and reedy mouldings, thin and shadowless, like so many cords stretched from cap to base and round the arch, without any proper distinction of jamb and archivolt.

The internal effect of the church is much finer than its west front would lead one to expect. The plan is simple; a nave and aisles of six bays, transepts with three eastern chapels to each, and a choir of one bay with an apse of four bays projecting beyond the others. The tower is in the angle between the north transept and the nave, and a large sacristy with an eastern apse is built against the south transept. The nave and aisles measure about 230 feet by 104, and the transept 160 feet by 48,--magnificent dimensions undoubtedly. The columns are simple, cylindrical, and very lofty, their capitals carved with foliage, which looks late and poor in its execution, though grouped in the old way in regular tufts or balls of foliage. The arrangement of the wall above the main arcade is very similar to that of the Veronese, and, indeed, to that of most Italian Gothic churches; a plain wall being carried up to the groining, relieved only by a small clerestory window at the highest point. One is apt to compare this arrangement with the artistic arrangement of clerestory and triforium in our own churches; but herein we do not act quite fairly to Nicola Pisano, who is said to have designed the Frari, and his brethren. They had to work in a country where light must be admitted very sparingly, and where therefore it is impossible for architects to revel in the rich traceries which fill the bays of the churches of the North; they lived among a nation of painters, and deemed, perhaps, that these plain surfaces of wall would one day glow with colour and with Scripture story. For these reasons, then, I defend them for the bareness and over-great plainness which are certainly at first felt to be so remarkable in their work. The real beauty of these interiors is owing, more than to anything else, I believe, to the simplicity and purity of the quadripartite groining which covers them in, and which, even where other features would seem to tell of debasement and absence of pure feeling, invariably recalls us to a proper recollection of the infinite value of simplicity in this important feature--a point lost sight of in England after the thirteenth century, to the incalculable detriment of the beauty of some of our greatest churches. It is not difficult to prove that this must be the case, for I take it for granted that we all feel that ornament for its own sake is valueless; and equally, that doing in a troublesome, and therefore costly way, that which may be done as well and as strongly in a simpler manner, is unpleasant and distasteful as an exhibition of the wasteful expenditure of human skill and energy; and therefore, as simple quadripartite groining with diagonal and transverse ribs, and no lierne or intermediate ribs, is quite sufficient for the construction, and as the vaults are in no degree whatever strengthened by the multiplication and ramification of perplexing ribs, such as we see in later days in fan tracery and other contemporary modes of vaulting, that it is the truest and most agreeable system of roofing in stone.

The simple groining of the Frari is entirely executed in brick, and springs in the aisles from pilasters corbelled out of the walls midway in height, just as in Sta. Anastasia at Verona, and in the nave and choir from clusters of shafts rising from the caps of the columns.

The apse is the noblest feature of the whole church; its windows, with their singular and not quite pleasing transome of tracery, are refreshing because they have tracery, though indeed it is of a rude and heavy kind.

There is something impressive about the arrangement of the church. The choir is prolonged by the length of about one bay and a half into the nave, and fenced off to the west by a great screen, surmounted by figures of the Apostles, with a crucifix rising in the centre. The nave is, of course, quite free from any fixed seats; and this, with the great area of the transept and the fine perspective of the long range of seven apsidal chapels on its east side, gives a grand air of spaciousness to the whole interior. There are some fine monuments here, quite worth notice as very characteristic of Italian art. They are generally high tombs corbelled out from the walls, with arched canopies over them, inclosing paintings. Here the south transept wall over the door to the vestry contains a group of such monuments, which is extremely picturesque. The monument of “Beatus Pacificus” (A.D. 1437) has a graceful painting of the Annunciation over its arch, and sculptures under it of the Baptism, and, on the tomb, of the Resurrection and the Descent into Hell.[39] Another monument has a life-size figure on horseback, and all have so much freshness to an English eye, and yet so much identity in principle with our own old monuments, that they are well worthy of study. Last, but not least, are two immense monuments facing each other, near the west end of the nave, to Canova and Titian, preposterous in size, heavy, ugly, and cold in character, quite unsuitable to a church, and, so far at least as I could judge, entirely devoid of merit as works of religious art. There is, too, a painting by Giovanni Bellini of the Madonna and Saints, which ought to be visited, in the grand and well-used sacristy--a room such as one never seems to see save in Italy. It is still in its old frame over the sacristy altar. Both in artistic interest and in religious effect it is perfectly fine; the subject--a Madonna and Child, such as Gian Bellini alone could paint. Angels playing instruments, sweet and pretty in character, and saints full of reverence and awe for Our Lord, all treated with a colour of exquisite depth and richness throughout, make this as worshipful a picture as I know. There is also in the north transept a most elaborately framed Gothic triptych, with figures well drawn and rich in colour.

The stalls in the Frari are all placed in the nave west of the transept, as in Westminster Abbey. They are of very rich Renaissance character, but with some late Gothic features. In the north transept is some elaborate Gothic panelling--very German in character--which looks as if it had come from the back of the old choir stalls. Here, too, is a crucifix, probably the original rood. Some fragments of stained glass are still visible; they are coarse and rude in detail, but extremely fine in colour; and one must picture the church full of rich glass in order to do justice to the scheme of the mediæval architect.

To the south of the nave are large uninteresting cloisters, and it is only at the east end that the exterior at all repays the ecclesiologist for the pains he must take to get all round it. The view which I give will best illustrate its general character. The windows are all transomed, the tracery and portions of the arches being executed in stone, the rest of the wall being entirely of brick or terra-cotta with some

red marble in the eaves-arcading; the bricks are not particularly good, and the terra-cotta borders, cornices, and ornaments are poor and meagre in their design. The most observable point about the detail is the great and ugly splay on the exterior of the windows, and the facts that the window mouldings are returned round the sills and that all the apsidal terminations in the church finish with an angle in the centre--a peculiarity which is very seldom met with, but very much to be commended as a variety.

There is a degree of clumsiness about the way in which the arches of the windows are set upon the jambs which is very characteristic of Italian Gothic; but this, and other points open to criticism, do not prevent the east end of this church from being a very noble conception, broad and grand, unbroken with the lines of buttresses which generally too much confuse apsidal terminations, and yet very vertical in its effect. There is no petty attempt at relieving or ornamenting plain wall where it occurs, but it is left in the native rudeness of the rather rough-looking red brick, which is in no respect better than the bricks one may get anywhere in England. The cornices are very marked, and those in the clerestory have the common and ungraceful corbelled arcading in brick, to which I have a special antipathy. The clerestory windows of the transepts and choir are, I need hardly say, quite modern, and of a kind, unfortunately, most popular throughout the north of Italy. North of the choir is a tall brick campanile, leaning rather dangerously to the North, finished with an octagonal upper stage, and, though not very remarkable, making a conspicuous feature in most of the views of this part of Venice, and at any rate to be admired for its simplicity and the absence of effort in its design.

Next in order of merit to this church are those of SS. Giovanni e Paolo and of the Madonna dell’ Orto, both of them savouring most strongly of the influence of the Pisani, and in very many points remarkably like the church of the Frari.

We will take SS. Giovanni e Paolo first. The plan is of the same sort as that of the Frari--nave with aisles, and transepts with two chapels opening on each side of them. These are all apsidal, but planned in the usual way and not as at the Frari. The east end is a fine composition, having an apse of seven sides, and is the only part of the exterior to which much praise can be given. It is divided into two stages by an elaborate brick cornice and a good balustraded passage in front of the upper windows. The traceries are all unskilfully designed, and set back from the face of the wall with a bald plain splay of brickwork round them; the lower windows here have two transoms, and the upper a single band of heavy tracery which performs the part of a transom in an ungainly fashion, though not so badly as in the great south-transept window in the same church. Here, just as at the Frari, it is obvious that the absence of buttresses to these many-sided apses is the secret of the largeness and breadth which mark them; and, to say the truth, not only are large buttresses to an apse often detrimental to its effect, but at the same time they are very often not wanted for strength. The interior is remarkable on account of the fine scale on which it is built, and for the large number of interesting monuments corbelled out from its walls. Many of them are mediæval and rich in sculpture of figures, not only on the tombs themselves, but again in the face of the wall, around their canopies. The effigy of the deceased is almost always placed on the top of the high tomb or sarcophagus, which, in order that it may be visible from below, is made with a slope towards the spectator, the effect of which is most distressing. Much more beautiful generally is the curtained tester often put above the figure, on either side of which guardian angels, holding back the folds of the draperies, allow us to join them in looking at the figure on the tomb. There is here a very fine lectern--a double-headed eagle standing on a scorpion--with a rich mediæval stand and base.

There are small two-light windows just over the arches in the nave which take the place of a triforium, and which look almost as if they were the clerestory windows of an earlier church whose arches were much less lofty than those which now exist.

In the small piazza in front of the church stands one of the glories of Venice--the monument of Bartolomeo Colleoni. As is the case with too many equestrian statues the base seems dangerously small for the steed, slow and stately as his movement is. What a grand air of valiant determination this old warrior wears! what a serious purpose the artist had in his work, and how carefully he has rendered every detail of trapping and armour on both man and horse! We have already heard of this famous condottiere in his chapel at Bergamo and in his castle of Malpaga. His statue was the work of Andrea Verocchio, but was completed by Alessandro Leopardi, between 1479 and 1488. Colleoni had left his whole fortune to the republic of Venice on condition that his statue should be placed in the Piazza of S. Mark. This being contrary to the laws, an ingenious loophole for escape was discovered; the bequest was secured by the erection of the statue in front of the Scuola di San Marco, whose strange Renaissance front (built with coloured marble in a horrible sort of perspective, which is the lowest depth to which architecture ever reached) stands at right angles to the front of SS. Giovanni e Paolo. For any one who wished to be remembered near S. Mark’s church, the catastrophe would be as great, if he cared about art, to find himself connected, instead, with such an abortion as the Scuola of that ilk, as it would be to Bartolomeo Colleoni to find himself here in the suburbs when he stipulated so carefully for a place in the very centre of the city!

Next in order of merit to SS. Giovanni e Paolo I should place the church of Sta. Maria dell’ Orto. This church is in a very bad state, and so far ruinous as to require to be supported in its interior by a forest of shores and scaffold-poles, which makes it quite impossible to get a good idea of the general effect. It has fair pointed arcades resting upon very Classic-looking columns, with capitals of poorly grouped and executed foliage. It is decidedly inferior to the two churches just described, in every respect save the treatment of its west front, which, poor as it is, sins less against all acknowledged rules than do theirs; its character is of a kind of pseudo-pointed, very flat, hard, and awkward. The cornice, with the open Italian pinnacles above it, over the central portion, is better in its effect than the singular row of niches which stands in lieu of cornice for the ends of the aisles; but it is worth while, nevertheless, to observe how simple is the design of these niches, taken separately, and how far this simplicity and the genuine beauty of their cusping and arching go towards redeeming the want of taste which is shown in the choice of their location. The doorway and rose window in the west front are of red and white marble, and in the side windows the tracery and monials are of white marble, and the jambs alternately red and white. The rest of the wall is brick, but has been plastered and washed with pink. The windows at the end of the aisles are remarkable for transoms of tracery supported upon two heights of delicate marble shafts, and entirely independent of the glazing which is fixed in frames within them. This kind of arrangement, incongruous and unsatisfactory as it is here, is worth recollecting, as being suggestive of an obvious opening for the use of traceried windows in domestic work; and it is a plan of most frequent occurrence in the best Italian ecclesiastical architecture. Many of the windows of Sta. Anastasia at Verona are constructed in this way, showing on the outside elaborately cusped and pierced plates of stone, against which on the inside the glazing is fixed, surrounded only with a plain circle of stone.

San Stefano is another really striking Gothic church. Its interior, notwithstanding the gaudy red damask with which the Venetians here and elsewhere delight to clothe the columns of their churches, is very fine and unlike what is common in the North of Europe. The dimensions are very large. The nave is about forty-eight feet wide, and the whole length about one hundred and seventy feet. There are a cloister and a chapter-house north of the nave, and a campanile detached at some distance to the east. The arcades of six pointed arches dividing the nave from either aisle are very light, and supported on delicate marble columns, whose capitals, with square abaci and foliage of Classical character, hardly look like Gothic work. The masonry and mouldings of the arches are not arranged in a succession of orders, as is the case in almost all good pointed work, but have a broad, plain soffeit, with a small and shallow moulding at the edge, finished with a dentil or billet ornament, which, originally used by the architect of S. Mark’s in order to form the lines of constructional stonework within which his encrusted marbles were held, was afterwards, down to the very decline of pointed architecture, used everywhere in Venice--not only in its original position, but, as at San Stefano, in place of a label round the arch. Its effect is much like that of the English dog-tooth ornament--a succession of sharp hard lights and shades, useful as giving value and force to a very small piece of stonework, and therefore exceedingly valuable when used as it is at S. Mark’s, and equally contemptible, I am bound to say, when used, as it is in later work at Venice, simply as an ornament; for this it is not and cannot be, as it is the result of no skill or taste on the part of the workman, but just such an enrichment as might be rather better done by machine than by hand. The roof of the nave is a painted timber roof, boarded in a series of cusped lines on the under side of the constructional framework, so as to hide it. I must not forget to add that the interior of San Stefano requires to be held together by iron ties in every direction--a sin to which, in Italy, the eye soon has to become accustomed.

The whole of the exterior is very carefully executed in brick, the moulded work being well done, though very late in date and not good in effect. The western doorway is of a favourite Venetian type. It is square-headed, enriched with mouldings and carving, and above it is an arched canopy with pinnacles on each side and with an ogee arched label carrying enormous crockets. The finial is a three-quarter figure, and an angel occupies the spandrel between the arch and the label. Above the door is a large circular window, unadorned with tracery or filling-in of any kind. The window from the east end of the church, of which I give an engraving, is a very characteristic example, of great width, and utterly unlike any example out of Venice.

Perhaps the very worst traceries in Venice--which is saying a good deal--are in the windows of the apse here, where the traceried arches of the head are repeated over the transom, but inverted and standing on their points. More worthy of admiration is a fine tomb corbelled out from the cloister wall to Andreas Contarina, “MCCCLVII. Dux creatus

MCCCLXXXII. in cœlumn sublatus;” the arched bridge under the choir (which is carried over a canal) should also be noted, as well as the very fine campanile, which, though not boasting of any Gothic detail, is full of the spirit which made the earlier campanili so effective. But if we wish to see the best campanile in Venice, I think we must go back to the Rialto, and there, not far from the Grand Canal, we shall see in that of San Giacomo a perfectly fine example.[40] It is almost entirely of brick, and the fine long lines of its arcades give a great effect of height, whilst the details are all good and quite Gothic in their character.

The other churches in Venice are of less importance than those which I have described, but the number of remains, of which only too many are desecrated, is very large. The Accademia has attached to it the desecrated church of the convent of La Carità. This has three parallel aisles ended with apses, the usual traceries and cornices, and the unusual (I am glad to say) feature of three western gables with arched outlines[41] filled in with much small tracery in brick and terra-cotta. Another desecrated church near this--that of San Gregorio--is more interesting. It is of the same general design as La Carità and, like it, is built of yellowish bricks. The window traceries are of white marble. The most interesting feature here is the cloister, entered by a remarkable doorway from the Grand Canal. The doorway is square-headed, with an ogee trefoiled archway or window on either side, and a sitting figure of a bishop under a slight canopy over the doorway. The cloister has five bays on each side, divided by columns which rest on a marble and brick base, and carry a wooden framework enriched with very good mouldings.

Another desecrated church is that “dei Servi,” which has a fine lofty brick front with a large rose window.

In the Campo Sta. Zaccaria is a portal much like that of San Stefano, save that it has in the tympanum a good figure of the Blessed Virgin with Our Lord with a saint on each side--the two Saints John, I think. The Virgin is seated on a Gothic throne carved in very low relief, and the whole composition is decidedly fine; comparing it with the doorway at Mazzorbo, I should say this must be a work of A.D. 1380. The church of Sta. Zaccaria is an early Renaissance building, with many of its arches pointed. It has an aisle and chapels round the choir, an unusual plan in Venice, but otherwise it has no interest.

The church of l’Abbazia has some fair detail in its cornices, with pinnacles at its west end of the same type as those in the Madonna dell’ Orto, and has poor ogee-headed pointed windows; near it is another of the canopied doorways--the gate of the Corte Vecchia--with an outer arched canopy, within which under an ogee-shaped label stands the Blessed Virgin with Our Lord in an aureole on her breast. Two saints stand at her side, and groups of little figures kneel at her feet, whilst from the upper finial Our Lord gives His blessing. This bears the date of 1505.

I think I have now said enough about these late Gothic churches. I have never been able to interest myself much about them. The work of which they are specimens is so exceedingly poor, cold, and distasteful to me, that I feel much inclined when I attempt to sketch them to give up ecclesiology in despair. The truth is that, S. Mark’s excepted--and of course it is a very wonderful exception--the churches in Venice do not come up to the expectations of any one who has ever experienced the delight of visiting the churches of much smaller cities in France, Germany, and England. True, indeed, there are much interest and a great breadth and dignity about the general effect of such a church as that of the Frari; but for all those lovely points of detail which in every direction amaze us by the art they display and the rich array of beauty with which they clothe the walls of Northern cathedrals, there is here no kind of equivalent.

When I had thoroughly come to this conclusion, and settled in my own mind by repeated inspection that my judgment was not harsh or unfair, I confess I felt a weight off my mind. I was now free to indulge myself to the full in the search for what Venice really has in greater abundance, perhaps, than any other city in Christendom--remains, namely, of mediæval domestic work. Nothing can be conceived more delightful than such a search. You seldom go a hundred yards--often it is much less--without coming upon some remains, or perhaps some nearly perfect example, of an old Venetian palace; and then, with the gondola fastened to one of the great posts which line all the canals, the well-satisfied gondolier lying stretched on his back behind the awning, your friends laughing and talking within its dark recess, you sit most luxuriously, and make your notes and sketches with a degree of quiet comfort which is not a little conducive to accurate and careful sketching, and to diligence in its pursuit.

Venetian palaces divide themselves naturally into two great classes--the Byzantine and the Gothic; and it surprized me very much to find remains so perfect and so extensive of the former class even on the banks of the Grand Canal itself, where change has been ever so frequent and so rife. Indeed, it is singular that nearly all the Byzantine palaces are situated on its banks.

Of these palaces, certainly the most striking by far are the Ca’ Loredan, the Ca’ Farsetti, and the Fondaco de’ Turchi. They all agree singularly in the general idea of their design, and consist of a grand scheme of arcading over the entire front. Divided generally into two stories in height, they are again divided in a marked manner in width into a centre and wings. This division is effected solely by a great difference in the spans of the arches forming the arcades, which in the wings are much narrower than in the central division. In the upper arcade the spaces between the columns, and indeed the whole arrangement, are often studiously unlike those in the lower range; but, at the same time, there is so very much similarity in the detail of the whole, that this variety, far from being perceived as an irregularity or a fault, does in truth just suffice to give force and vitality to what might otherwise appear to be monotonous and too often repeated, and recalls to mind not a little the very similar kind of difference between the upper and lower order of shafts already described in the west front of S. Mark’s.

We cannot do better than take, as an example of the finest type of a Byzantine palace, the magnificent, though now desolate, decaying, and ruined façade of the Fondaco de’ Turchi, once the palace of the Dukes of Ferrara. The whole front of this was originally cased with a thin facing of marble, like the coeval works at S. Mark’s--a kind of decoration which, neglected as this fine relic has been for years, we cannot be surprized to find almost altogether destroyed; small fragments do, however, still here and there remain to tell of the original magnificence of the work. The lower stage of the Fondaco consists of a continuous arcade of ten open arches, with three narrower arches at either end, forming the wings, so to speak; the upper stage has eighteen arches in the centre, and four in each wing. In the wings the piers supporting the arches are, I think, all moulded pilasters; in the centre all the arches rest upon columns; and throughout the whole building the arches, which are all semicircular, are considerably stilted. The entire building is constructed in brick, which was originally, as I have before said, covered all over with a thin veneer of marble; in the spandrels of all the arches this is relieved by small circular medallions delicately carved, and over the upper stage is a string-course, above which there would seem to have been a long series of slightly sunk panels with round-arched heads, filled in with delicately arranged and beautifully sculptured patterns in marble. These panels are immediately below the eaves of the roof. Many of the abaci and string-courses, and all the thin pieces of marble which form the soffeits of the arches, have their projections finished either with a nail-head or dentil moulding, and between the shafts of the upper stage there are traces of balconies.[42]

A very noticeable point in the general effect of the façade of the Fondaco de’ Turchi is that, from the peculiar shape and great projection of the capitals of the shafts and the narrow span of the arches, the whole of the arcading has, at a small distance, almost the effect of a series of trefoils, and so seems to pave the way for the continuous traceries of the Ducal Palace and other later buildings.

There is a ruined fragment of a house of the same age as the Fondaco de’ Turchi in a canal behind the Foscari Palace. Here the centre arch is very wide, has four stilted arches on the sides, the archivolts are all delicately carved, and small sculptured medallions are introduced in the spandrels. Here, I think, the red brick of the walls was always intended to be seen. Of very similar character is a much larger fragment on the right of the Grand Canal after passing under the Rialto. Here there are two stories still remaining. The round-arched doorway has two open and stilted arches on each side, and then a space of blank wall; and the upper stage has a group of seven arches in the centre, and a single arch at each end over the blank wall below. The labels of these upper arches are turned up at the point into an ogee shape, which, strange as it may seem, must be original, as the detail is early, and they are surmounted by a collection of carved medallions and a carved string-course of early style.[43]

The Ca’ Loredan has two stages in height, above which all is modern--but all the Byzantine arrangements of these two stages are perfect. There are five open arches in the centre, and an arcaded pier on each side; and in the next stage, though the division of centre and wings is preserved, the arches are increased in number, and consequently the columns of this stage do not come above those of the lower stage. The string-courses are formed with a billet mould; the capitals are some of them genuine Byzantine, and some copies of Corinthian. The wall-faces were all inlaid, but they were in part altered in the fourteenth century, when some coats-of-arms and figures were added. Those at the extreme angles are of David and Goliath, and on each side of the centre sitting figures of Justice and Force.

Next to the Ca’ Loredan is the Ca’ Farsetti (now the Municipio), which is, I think, slightly the older building of the two. Here there are three arches resting on shafts in the centre, and an equal number resting on piers on each side, and a continuous arcade of fifteen arches on the upper stage resting on coupled shafts.

The Palazzo Businetto on the Grand Canal opposite the Ca’ Grimani, has remains of Byzantine work in its two lower stages. Here the caps are Byzantine in character, the archivolts flat inlays, with a billet mould on each side, and a carved string-course of running foliage inclosed between two lines of notched or billet mould.

This short notice of some of the more important Romanesque and Byzantine remains enables me to make a few general deductions: (1.) These buildings were always of two stages in height. (2.) They had the entrance in the centre, and had generally a distinction between the centre and the wings. (3.) The capitals were generally Byzantine in character, but often copied from Corinthian. (4.) They were of brick, but generally veneered with thin slabs of marble. (5.) They were enriched with circular, square, and arched medallions inclosing carving of foliage and animals, and frequently of coupled birds or animals regarding each other,--a device always indicative of an early date and an Eastern origin; and (6.) The string-courses were generally carved either with continuous running foliage, or with leaves arranged in threes; the centre turning over, the side leaves extended flatwise, and upward. This last string-course is exactly copied from Sta. Fosca, Torcello, and is carved all round S. Mark’s inside; whilst the former, though it is Byzantine in origin, is carried round the wall of the Ducal Palace between the south-east angle and the Bridge of Sighs. The illustration of a Byzantine cistern from the centre of a courtyard which I give, is useful as shewing very clearly the character of the carved foliage which adorns the string-courses and panels of these Byzantine buildings. This is always effectively carved with deep cuttings, which produce bright and sparkling effects of light and shade.

One especial fault of the Venetians seems to have been their proneness to repeat the same architectural idea an infinite number of times; and there is something in this so characteristic of the place and the people, that the reason for it is worthy of some consideration. Venice, surrounded by water, and cut off from that kind of emulation which in other places always has the effect of producing life and change very rapidly in the phases of art, seems to have contented herself, when once she had well done, with the conviction that improvement was either impossible or unnecessary, and so, whilst changes were going on in the mainland, to have rested satisfied with a slight alteration only, and that one of detail always, for centuries; and it is thus that I account for the singular sameness which characterized all the efforts of her Gothic artists. The façade of the Ducal Palace is really precisely the same in its idea as that of the Fondaco de’ Turchi or the Ca’ Loredan, altered only in detail--its very beautiful traceries taking the place of, but doing the same work as, the simple encrusted arcades of its predecessors. And again, in the fronts of other and much smaller palaces--indeed, in all the fronts of the Gothic period--it is singular how exactly the same idea in the general arrangement is always preserved. Let me describe an ordinary palace. It is divided into three or four stories in height, the several stages being generally separated by string-courses. The lower story opens, by an arched doorway in the centre, to the water; and on either side of this doorway a few small windows serve to light the basement. The second stage has a grand window of some five or six lights, divided by shafts of marble, and rich with tracery, in the centre; and on either side, one or two single lights, with tracery corresponding with--and often, as it were, cut out in a slice from--the traceries of the central window. The third stage is nearly a reproduction of the second, though sometimes slightly less important; and the upper stage is either again a repetition of the others, or else consists of a few small windows placed over the others, and very unimportant and unpretending. The whole is crowned by a slightly projecting eaves-cornice, generally very meagre in its character, and with a line of genuine dog-tooth ornament on its lower edge. Above this, probably--for only one or two examples remain at all in their original state--was a parapet like those which still in part remain on the Ca’ d’Oro, at the back of the Ca’ Foscari, and on the Ducal Palace, light and fantastic to a degree, and almost masking the flat roof behind.

Such, as will be seen by the views with which, I doubt not, almost all my readers must be familiar, is the general idea of the Gothic palaces in Venice, and it admits of very slight modification. Occasionally, as in the Ca’ d’Oro, the windows are inclosed within a square line of delicate moulding, the space within which is encrusted with marble, and entirely distinct from the string-courses, so as to give very much the impression of a plain wall veneered here and there with a window; or, again, sometimes the whole central division of the first and second stories is veneered on to a façade in which the other windows are treated constructionally but in all cases from first to last (except, as we shall see, in the Ducal Palace, and for this exception there is some explanation in its vast size and other reasons), the distinction between the centre and the wings was never lost sight of, and never forgotten. This was the great idea of all these buildings, and most perseveringly was it reproduced down to the last, when, gradually losing even the life which beautiful detail had once lent, it sank through successive stages, until at last, easily and well-nigh imperceptibly, it succumbed, without a struggle, to the rise of the Renaissance feeling, giving only in revenge to its successor, the curse of an obligation still to go on building to the last, for whatever want or on whatever occasion, with the conviction that a centre and two wings must ever be necessary to a grand façade. It so happens that, in addition to the large and purely Byzantine palaces in which this arrangement is preserved,--in a delicate manner, it is true,--there still remains one remarkable example of the period of transition from Byzantine to Gothic, in a house which forms one side of the Corte del Remer (facing the Grand Canal just above the spot where it is spanned by the Rialto), which serves to shew clearly the first attempt at translation of this Byzantine idea into Gothic.

In the principal story of this house the central feature is the entrance doorway, whose finely ornamented arch of markedly horseshoe outline is very conspicuous. On either side of this, and connected with it in one group, are two windows divided by shafts and with arches of very singular shape; it is as though a stilted semicircular arch had been suddenly turned up in the centre, not with the graceful ogee curve of later days, but with simple, hard, straight lines. Beyond these windows, one of later date, but probably inserted in the place of the original window, completes the similarity which the arrangement of the openings in this house bears to that common in all the later Gothic palaces. The arches which support the staircase in front of this house are entirely executed in brick, and are probably later in date than the house itself, though it is noticeable that they are of a very early and pure type, and that here, as generally throughout the North of Italy, the pointed arch was first used in construction, and then, some time after its first introduction, and very generally in some modified form, for ornamentation also.

And now, having so far cleared the way, let me ask my readers to go with me to the Ducal Palace, and there undertake a somewhat careful examination of its very famous design.

I shall not enter into a general description of the entire building, because, as this has undergone prodigious alterations since its first erection, it is unnecessary to do much more than refer to the two fronts, which still retain, nearly without alteration, their mediæval design, and to those portions only of the interior and courtyard which have not been altered.

The whole building forms three sides of a hollow square: one side rises out of the deep recesses of the Rio del Palazzo, spanned near its outlet by the famous Bridge of Sighs, and is entirely of Renaissance work; the next side, rising from the Riva dei Schiavoni, faces the Giudecca, and is of the purest Venetian Gothic; and the third, facing the Piazzetta di San Marco--the small square which connects S. Mark’s with the water--is also Gothic, and of the same type. The back or north side of the palace abuts upon S. Mark’s.

I cannot pretend to decide at all absolutely upon the vexed question of the dates of the mediæval portions, because, as the reader will find in an interesting discussion on the subject in the second volume of Mr. Ruskin’s ‘Stones of Venice,’ it is a source of hot disputes. But the following appear to me to be the main points.

The Ducal Palace was burnt in 1105, restored in 1116, and rebuilt in 1173-1177. The two columns on the Piazzetta were brought to Venice in 1172, about which time the two Piazze were formed. Between this date and 1301, nothing is recorded to have been done to the palace. But even at this date it was a grand building, and is described in 1275 by Maestro Martino da Canale as “Grande e bellissimo a maraviglia.”[44] He was equally enthusiastic about the church of “Monsignore San Marco,” and of his campanile, “so great and so high that one cannot find its equal.” Sivos in his chronicle (A.D. 1621) says that the Sala Grande was commenced in 1301, and completed in 1310, at which date the Grand Council consisted of nine hundred members; and one Pietro Baseggio is said to have been the architect between 1309 and 1361; he was succeeded or assisted by Filippo Calandario, and both of them, according to Zanotto, were described as being architects, sculptors, and navigators![45] Calandario had raised himself from the humble post of shipbuilder at Murano, to that of Capo Maestro of the Ducal Palace, a man of great weight in the city, but finally finished his career only too much in accordance with custom, being convicted as one of Marino Falieri’s fellow-conspirators, and hung from the balcony of the Ducal Palace in A.D. 1355.

On the 28th of December, 1340, a decree was issued ordering the construction of a staircase on the east side of the palace to lead to the new rooms, which seems to establish the fact that at this date a considerable portion at any rate of the second stage was built. The plague visited Venice in 1359 and 1361, and stopped all work. In 1362, because the unfinished work was going to ruin, the Council determined to complete the new hall; and in 1365, this being done, Guariento of Padua began to paint it, in the time of the Doge Mario Cornaro.[46]

The capital next the south-west angle of the lower stage bears a date which appears to some[47] to be 1344 (as to which I have never been able to satisfy myself), and long afterwards we find the date, 1404, on the large window of the highest story of the sea-front. Finally, in 1419, there was a great fire which damaged the old portion of the building, so much that a decree was passed to rebuild it in conformity with the rest, and this work was completed in 1423, when the council sat in their great council chamber for the first time; and in 1439-41 the last Gothic work was added to the palace by the Doge Foscari, viz. the Porta della Carta, built (as appears by their contract) by Giovanni and Bartolomeo Bons, between the years 1438 and 1443, in the small space which intervenes between the north-west angle of the Ducal Palace and the south side of S. Mark’s. All these dates are important, and I believe undisputed, the only question being as to which parts of the building they refer to.

And now, before I say more about dates, let me describe these two Gothic fronts--the sea-front and the Piazzetta-front--and then we may perhaps see our way to some sort of comprehension of the relative ages of the various portions of the fabric.

The whole design is divided into three stages in height, the upper nearly equal to the united height of the two lower stages, and faced entirely with a delicate diaper of marble cut in small oblong pieces, which look, save in their texture and colour, only too much like bricks. In this marble-faced wall are pierced a number of windows with pointed arches--the tracery of which has been taken out--and in or near the centre of each façade a much larger window and balcony, which look as though they had been subsequently inserted. The lowest stage consists of a long and uniform arcade of very simple pointed arches resting upon circular columns with elaborately carved caps; these have been shortened by some twenty inches of their old height, by the rise of the water, and the consequent elevation of the pavement of the Riva, to the great damage of their effect. The intermediate stage is a magnificent arcade, supporting very vigorous tracery, too well known to everybody to require much description, and divided from the stages above and below it by large and pronounced lines of carved and moulded string-courses.

It is important to observe that up to the top of the second string-course the whole of the architecture is of the very best kind of Venetian pointed; the arches of the lowest stage are well proportioned, and, though very simply, still well moulded; and the detail of the whole of the second stage is, to say the least, not at all inferior. They form together, without exception, I believe, from all I have either seen myself or heard, the very best and truest specimen of Gothic architecture south of the Alps.

Above this noble work the third stage comes, and I confess, to my eye, with patent marks in every stone of which it is composed, that it was designed by some other hand than that which had been so successful below. There is something quite chilling in the great waste of plain unbroken wall coming above the extreme richness of the arcades which support it; and moreover, this placing of the richer work below and the plainer above is so contrary not only to all ordinary canons of architecture, but just as much to the ordinary practice of the Venetians, that I feel sure that the impression which I have had from my first acquaintance with drawings of it is substantially correct, viz. that the line at which alterations and additions have been made is to be looked for rather in a horizontal than in a vertical direction; that in all probability, consequently, the builder of A.D. 1301 commenced with some portion of the sea-façade and gradually carried on the greater part of the building to the height of the two stages as we now see them, leaving his building finished in precisely the same way as the corresponding halls at Padua and Vicenza--two stories in height, with arcades covering the outer walls of the upper as well as of the lower stage; and that when the Council Chamber was found to be too small, and larger rooms were required, another architect suggested the advantage of obtaining them by raising an immense story above the others, and, without destroying much of his predecessor’s work, providing rooms on the most magnificent scale for the Doge and his Council.

The assumption that the Piazzetta-front has been copied from the sea-front involves a belief in a veneration for and exact imitation of older work which is (to say the least) extraordinarily rare, if not unique, in mediæval works. It involves a belief also in the possibility of a spirited and successful copy being made of an old capital by a mediæval sculptor without fresh thought or any fresh invention of any kind. This will be seen if we examine the capitals of the lower stage of the palace. Here at first sight one is struck by what appears to be the astonishing variety of the capitals. They are nearly all adorned with figures or subjects as well as with foliage, and are certainly in both fronts of various degrees of merit; but on closer acquaintance it is perceived that the variety of capitals is not so great as it seems, for that several of those in each front are merely replicas of those in the other. If any portion of the two lower stages had been built before the rest, it would have been the whole of the sea-front and six arches of the Piazzetta-front, for at the end of these there is a column equal in size to those at the angles, and which might therefore by possibility itself have been an angle column for a time. But its larger size may also fairly be accounted for by the fact that it comes under the side wall of the large building above, and was in any case therefore a convenient arrangement if not quite a necessity; but the real difficulty seems to me to be, that if there were any considerable difference in the date of these works, all experience would lead one to expect that the earlier works would be the most uniform and the best, whereas in point of fact this is far from being the case. For instance, in the sea-front there are various capitals which are of poor execution. These are, counting from the south-east angle, the third (large and coarse heads), the eighth (also coarse heads), the thirteenth (lions’ heads), the fourteenth (beasts), and the fifteenth, which is certainly not so fine as the replica in the Piazzetta-front (the twenty-sixth capital, counting as before).[48]

The case for the contemporaneous erection of these two fronts becomes even stronger if we ascend to the open gallery on the first floor and examine the capitals there. They are all similar in general character; and though they become gradually better as one goes from the south-east to the north-west, they give the impression of all being of nearly one date, and moreover they all appear to be later in date than the whole of those in the lower stage.