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Stones of Venice [introductions]

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"1335, June 1. We, Andrew Dandolo and Mark Loredano, procurators of St.
Mark's, have paid to Martin the stone-cutter and his associates....
[Footnote: "Libras tres, soldeos 15 grossorum."--Cadorin, 189, I.]
for a stone of which the lion is made which is put over the gate of the
palace."

"1344, November 4. We have paid thirty-five golden ducats for making
gold leaf, to gild the lion which is over the door of the palace
stairs."

The position of this door is disputed, and is of no consequence to the
reader, the door itself having long ago disappeared, and been replaced
by the Porta della Carta.

SECTION XVIII. But before it was finished, occasion had been discovered
for farther improvements. The Senate found their new Council Chamber
inconveniently small, and, about thirty years after its completion,
began to consider where a larger and more magnificent one might be
built. The government was now thoroughly established, and it was
probably felt that there was some meanness in the retired position, as
well as insufficiency in the size, of the Council Chamber on the Rio.
The first definite account which I find of their proceedings, under
these circumstances, is in the Caroldo Chronicle: [Footnote: Cod. Ven.,
No. CXLI. p. 365.]

"1340. On the 28th of December, in the preceding year, Master Marco
Erizzo, Nicolo Soranzo, and Thomas Gradenigo, were chosen to examine
where a new saloon might be built in order to assemble therein the
Greater Council.... On the 3rd of June, 1341, the Great Council elected
two procurators of the work of this saloon, with a salary of eighty
ducats a year."

It appears from the entry still preserved in the Archivio, and quoted by
Cadorin, that it was on the 28th of December, 1340, that the
commissioners appointed to decide on this important matter gave in their
report to the Grand Council, and that the decree passed thereupon for the
commencement of a new Council Chamber on the Grand Canal. [Footnote:
Sansovino is more explicit than usual in his reference to this decree:
"For it having appeared that the place (the first Council Chamber) is not
capacious enough, the saloon on the Grand Canal was ordered." "Per cio
parendo che il luogo non fosse capace, fu ordinata la Sala sul Canal
Grande."--P. 324.]

_The room then begun is the one now in existence_, and its building
involved the building of all that is best and most beautiful in the
present Ducal Palace, the rich arcades of the lower stories being all
prepared for sustaining this Sala del Gran Consiglio.

SECTION XIX. In saying that it is the same now in existence, I do not
mean that it has undergone no alterations; as we shall see hereafter, it
has been refitted again and again, and some portions of its walls
rebuilt; but in the place and form in which it first stood, it still
stands; and by a glance at the position which its windows occupy, as
shown in Figure II. above, the reader will see at once that whatever can
be known respecting the design of the Sea Façade, must be gleaned out of
the entries which refer to the building of this Great Council Chamber.

Cadorin quotes two of great importance, to which we shall return in due
time, made during the progress of the work in 1342 and 1344; then one of
1349, resolving that the works at the Ducal Palace, which had been
discontinued during the plague, should be resumed; and finally one in
1362, which speaks of the Great Council Chamber as having been neglected
and suffered to fall into "great desolation," and resolves that it shall
be forthwith completed. [Footnote: Cadorin, 185, 2. The decree of 1342
is falsely given as of 1345 by the Sivos Chronicle, and by Magno; while
Sanuto gives the decree to its right year, 1342, but speaks of the
Council Chamber as only begun in 1345.]

The interruption had not been caused by the plague only, but by the
conspiracy of Faliero, and the violent death of the master builder.
[Footnote: Calendario. See Appendix I., Vol. III.] The work was resumed
in 1362, and completed within the next three years, at least so far as
that Guariento was enabled to paint his Paradise on the walls;
[Footnote: "II primo che vi colorisse fu Guariento il quale l'anno 1365
vi fece il Paradiso in testa della sala."--_Sansovino_.] so that
the building must, at any rate, have been roofed by this time. Its
decorations and fittings, however, were long in completion; the
paintings on the roof being only executed in 1400. [Footnote: "L'an poi
1400 vi fece il ciclo compartita a quadretti d'oro, ripieni di stelle,
ch'era la insegna del Doge Steno."--_Sansovino_, lib. viii.] They
represented the heavens covered with stars, [Footnote: "In questi tempi
si messe in oro il ciclo della sala del Gran Consiglio et si fece il
pergole del finestra grande chi guarda sul canale, adornato l'uno e
l'altro di stelle, eh' erano la insegne del Doge."--_Sansovino_,
lib. xiii. Compare also Pareri, p. 129.] this being, says Sansovino, the
bearings of the Doge Steno. Almost all ceilings and vaults were at this
time in Venice covered with stars, without any reference to armorial
bearings; but Steno claims, under his noble title of Stellifer, an
important share in completing the chamber, in an inscription upon two
square tablets, now inlaid in the walls on each side of the great window
towards the sea:

"MILLE QUADRINGENTI CURREBANT QUATUOR ANNI
HOC OPUS ILLUSTRIS MICHAEL DUX STELLIFER AUXIT."

And in fact it is to this Doge that we owe the beautiful balcony of that
window, though the work above it is partly of more recent date; and I
think the tablets bearing this important inscription have been taken out
and reinserted in the newer masonry. The labor of these final
decorations occupied a total period of sixty years. The Grand Council
sat in the finished chamber for the first time in 1423. In that year the
Gothic Ducal Palace of Venice was completed. It had taken, to build it,
the energies of the entire period which I have above described as the
central one of her life.

SECTION XX. 3rd. The RENAISSANCE PALACE. I must go back a step or two,
in order to be certain that the reader understands clearly the state of
the palace in 1423. The works of addition or renovation had now been
proceeding, at intervals, during a space of a hundred and twenty-three
years. Three generations at least had been accustomed to witness the
gradual advancement of the form of the Ducal Palace into more stately
symmetry, and to contrast the Works of sculpture and painting with which
it was decorated,--full of the life, knowledge, and hope of the
fourteenth century,--with the rude Byzantine chiselling of the palace of
the Doge Ziani. The magnificent fabric just completed, of which the new
Council Chamber was the nucleus, was now habitually known in Venice as
the "Palazzo Nuovo;" and the old Byzantine edifice, now ruinous, and
more manifest in its decay by its contrast with the goodly stones of the
building which had been raised at its side, was of course known as the
"Palazzo Vecchio." [Footnote: Baseggio (Pareri, p. 127) is called the
Proto of the _New_ Palace. Farther notes will be found in Appendix I.,
Vol. III.] That fabric, however, still occupied the principal position in
Venice. The new Council Chamber had been erected by the side of it
towards the Sea; but there was not then the wide quay in front, the Riva
dei Schiavoni, which now renders the Sea Façade as important as that to
the Piazzetta. There was only a narrow walk between the pillars and the
water; and the _old_ palace of Ziani still faced the Piazzetta, and
interrupted, by its decrepitude, the magnificence of the square where the
nobles daily met. Every increase of the beauty of the new palace rendered
the discrepancy between it and the companion building more painful; and
then began to arise in the minds of all men a vague idea of the necessity
of destroying the old palace, and completing the front of the Piazzetta
with the same splendor as the Sea Façade. But no such sweeping measure of
renovation had been Contemplated by the Senate when they first formed the
plan of their new Council Chamber. First a single additional room, then a
gateway, then a larger room; but all considered merely as necessary
additions to the palace, not as involving the entire reconstruction of
the ancient edifice. The exhaustion of the treasury, and the shadows upon
the political horizon, rendered it more than imprudent to incur the vast
additional expense which such a project involved; and the Senate, fearful
of itself, and desirous to guard against the weakness of its own
enthusiasm, passed a decree, like the effort of a man fearful of some
strong temptation to keep his thoughts averted from the point of danger.
It was a decree, not merely that the old palace should not be rebuilt,
but that no one should _propose_ rebuilding it. The feeling of the
desirableness of doing so was, too strong to permit fair discussion, and
the Senate knew that to bring forward such a motion was to carry it.

SECTION XXI. The decree, thus passed in order to guard against their own
weakness, forbade any one to speak of rebuilding the old palace under
the penalty of a thousand ducats. But they had rated their own
enthusiasm too low: there was a man among them whom the loss of a
thousand ducats could not deter from proposing what he believed to be
for the good of the state.

Some excuse was given him for bringing forward the motion, by a fire
which occurred in 1419, and which injured both the church of St. Mark's,
and part of the old palace fronting the Piazzetta. What followed, I
shall relate in the words of Sanuto. [Footnote: Cronaca Sanudo, No.
cxxv. in the Marcian Library, p. 568.]

SECTION XXII. "Therefore they set themselves with all diligence and care
to repair and adorn sumptuously, first God's house; but in the Prince's
house things went on more slowly, _for it did not please the Doge_
[Footnote: Tomaso Mocenigo.] _to restore it in the form in which it
was before_; and they could not rebuild it altogether in a better
manner, so great was the parsimony of these old fathers; because it was
forbidden by laws, which condemned in a penalty of a thousand ducats any
one who should propose to throw down the _old_ palace, and to
rebuild it more richly and with greater expense. But the Doge, who was
magnanimous, and who desired above all things what was honorable to the
city, had the thousand ducats carried into the Senate Chamber, and then
proposed that the palace should be rebuilt; saying: that, 'since the
late fire had ruined in great part the Ducal habitation (not only his
own private palace, but all the places used for public business) this
occasion was to be taken for an admonishment sent from God, that they
ought to rebuild the palace more nobly, and in a way more befitting the
greatness to which, by God's grace, their dominions had reached; and
that his motive in proposing this was neither ambition, nor selfish
interest: that, as for ambition, they might have seen in the whole
course of his life, through so many years, that he had never done
anything for ambition, either in the city, or in foreign business; but
in all his actions had kept justice first in his thoughts, and then the
advantage of the state, and the honor of the Venetian name: and that, as
far as regarded his private interest, if it had not been for this
accident of the fire, he would never have thought of changing anything
in the palace into either a more sumptuous or a more honorable form; and
that during the many years in which he had lived in it, he had never
endeavored to make any change, but had always been content with it, as
his predecessors had left it; and that he knew well that, if they took
in hand to build it as he exhorted and besought them, being now very
old, and broken down with many toils, God would call him to another life
before the walls were raised a pace from the ground. And that therefore
they might perceive that he did not advise them to raise this building
for his own convenience, but only for the honor of the city and its
Dukedom; and that the good of it would never be felt by him, but by his
successors.' Then he said, that 'in order, as he had always done, to
observe the laws,... he had brought with him the thousand ducats which
had been appointed as the penalty for proposing such a measure, so that
he might prove openly to all men that it was not his own advantage that
he sought, but the dignity of the state.'" There was no one (Sanuto goes
on to tell us) who ventured, or desired, to oppose the wishes of the
Doge; and the thousand ducats were unanimously devoted to the expenses
of the work. "And they set themselves with much diligence to the work;
and the palace was begun in the form and manner in which it is at
present seen; but, as Mocenigo had prophesied, not long after, he ended
his life, and not only did not see the work brought to a close, but
hardly even begun."

SECTION XXIII. There are one or two expressions in the above extracts
which if they stood alone, might lead the reader to suppose that the
whole palace had been thrown down and rebuilt. We must however remember,
that, at this time, the new Council Chamber, which had been one hundred
years in building, was actually unfinished, the council had not yet sat
in it; and it was just as likely that the Doge should then propose to
destroy and rebuild it, as in this year, 1853, it is that any one should
propose in our House of Commons to throw down the new Houses of
Parliament, under the title of the "old palace," and rebuild _them_.

SECTION XXIV. The manner in which Sanuto expresses himself will at once
be seen to be perfectly natural, when it is remembered that although we
now speak of the whole building as the "Ducal Palace," it consisted, in
the minds of the old Venetians, of four distinct buildings. There were
in it the palace, the state prisons, the senate-house, and the offices
of public business; in other words, it was Buckingham Palace, the Tower
of olden days, the Houses of Parliament, and Downing Street, all in one;
and any of these four portions might be spoken of, without involving an
allusion to any other. "Il Palazzo" was the Ducal residence, which, with
most of the public offices, Mocenigo _did_ propose to pull down and
rebuild, and which was actually pulled down and rebuilt. But the new
Council Chamber, of which the whole façade to the Sea consisted, never
entered into either his or Sanuto's mind for an instant, as necessarily
connected with the Ducal residence.

I said that the new Council Chamber, at the time when Mocenigo brought
forward his measure, had never yet been used. It was in the year 1422
[Footnote: Vide notes in Appendix.] that the decree passed to rebuild
the palace: Mocenigo died in the following year, and Francesco Foscari
was elected in his room. [Footnote: On the 4th of April, 1423, according
to the copy of the Zancarol Chronicle in the Marcian Library, but
previously, according to the Caroldo Chronicle, which makes Foscari
enter the Senate as Doge on the 3rd of April.] The Great Council Chamber
was used for the first time on the day when Foscari entered the Senate
as Doge,--the 3rd of April, 1423, according to the Caroldo Chronicle;
[Footnote: "Nella quale (the Sala del Gran Consiglio) non si fece Gran
Consiglio salvo nell' anno 1423, alli 3, April, et fu il primo giorno
che il Duce Foscari venisse in Gran Consiglio dopo la sua
creatione."--Copy in Marcian Library, p. 365.] the 23rd, which is
probably correct, by an anonymous MS., No. 60, in the Correr Museum;
[Footnote: "E a di 23 April (1423, by the context) sequente fo fatto
Gran Conscio in la salla nuovo dovi avanti non esta piu fatto Gran
Conscio si che el primo Gran Conscio dopo la sua (Foscari's) creation fo
fatto in la sala nuova, nel qual conscio fu el Marchese di Mantoa," &c.,
p. 426.]--and, the following year, on the 27th of March, the first
hammer was lifted up against the old palace of Ziani. [Footnote: Compare
Appendix I. Vol. III.]

SECTION XXV. That hammer stroke was the first act of the period properly
called the "Renaissance" It was the knell of the architecture of
Venice,--and of Venice herself.

The central epoch of her life was past; the decay had already begun: I
dated its commencement above (Ch. I., Vol. I.) from the death of
Mocenigo. A year had not yet elapsed since that great Doge had been
called to his account: his patriotism, always sincere, had been in this
instance mistaken; in his zeal for the honor of future Venice, he had
forgotten what was due to the Venice of long ago. A thousand palaces
might be built upon her burdened islands, but none of them could take
the place, or recall the memory, of that which was first built upon her
unfrequented shore. It fell; and, as if it had been the talisman of her
fortunes, the city never flourished again.

SECTION XXVI. I have no intention of following out, in their intricate
details, the operations which were begun under Foscari and continued
under succeeding Doges till the palace assumed its present form, for I
am not in this work concerned, except by occasional reference, with the
architecture of the fifteenth century: but the main facts are the
following. The palace of Ziani was destroyed; the existing façade to the
Piazzetta built, so as both to continue and to resemble, in most
particulars, the work of the Great Council Chamber. It was carried back
from the Sea as far as the Judgment angle; beyond which is the Porta
della Carta, begun in 1439, and finished in two years, under the Doge
Foscari; [Footnote: "Tutte queste fatture si compirono sotto il dogade
del Foscari, nel 1441."--_Pareri_, p. 131.] the interior buildings
connected with it were added by the Doge Christopher Moro, (the Othello
of Shakspeare) [Footnote: This identification has been accomplished, and
I think conclusively, by my friend Mr. Rawdon Brown, who has devoted all
the leisure which, during the last twenty years his manifold office of
kindness to almost every English visitant of Venice have left him, in
discovering and translating the passages of the Venetian records which
bear upon English history and literature. I shall have occasion to take
advantage hereafter of a portion of his labors, which I trust will
shortly be made public.] in 1462.

SECTION XXVII. By reference to the figure the reader will see that we
have now gone the round of the palace, and that the new work of 1462 was
close upon the first piece of the Gothic palace, the _new_ Council
Chamber of 1301. Some remnants of the Ziani Palace were perhaps still
left between the two extremities of the Gothic Palace; or as is more
probable, the last stones of it may have been swept away after the fire
of 1419, and replaced by new apartments for the Doge. But whatever
buildings, old or new, stood on this spot at the time of the completion
of the Porta della Carta were destroyed by another great fire in 1479,
together with so much of the palace on the Rio that, though the saloon
of Gradenigo, then known as the Sala de' Pregadi, was not destroyed, it
became necessary to reconstruct the entire façades of the portion of the
palace behind the Bridge of Sighs, both towards the court and canal.
This work was entrusted to the best Renaissance architects of the close
of the fifteenth and opening of the sixteenth centuries; Antonio Ricci
executing the Giant's staircase, and on his absconding with a large sum
of the public money, Pietro Lombardo taking his place. The whole work
must have been completed towards the middle of the sixteenth century.
The architects of the palace, advancing round the square and led by
fire, had more than reached the point from which they had set out; and
the work of 1560 was joined to the work of 1301-1340, at the point
marked by the conspicuous vertical line in Figure II on the Rio Façade.

SECTION XVIII. But the palace was not long permitted to remain in this
finished form. Another terrific fire, commonly called the great fire,
burst out in 1574, and destroyed the inner fittings and all the precious
pictures of the Great Council Chamber, and of all the upper rooms on the
Sea Façade, and most of those on the Rio Façade, leaving the building a
mere shell, shaken and blasted by the flames. It was debated in the
Great Council whether the ruin should not be thrown down, and an
entirely new palace built in its stead. The opinions of all the leading
architects of Venice were taken, respecting the safety of the walls, or
the possibility of repairing them as they stood. These opinions, given
in writing, have been preserved, and published by the Abbé Cadorin, in
the work already so often referred to; and they form one of the most
important series of documents connected with the Ducal Palace.

I cannot help feeling some childish pleasure in the accidental
resemblance to my own name in that of the architect whose opinion was
first given in favor of the ancient fabric, Giovanni Rusconi. Others,
especially Palladio, wanted to pull down the old palace, and execute
designs of their own; but the best architects in Venice, and to his
immortal honor, chiefly Francesco Sansovino, energetically pleaded for
the Gothic pile, and prevailed. It was successfully repaired, and
Tintoret painted his noblest picture on the wall from which the Paradise
of Guariento had withered before the flames.

SECTION XXIX. The repairs necessarily undertaken at this time were
however extensive, and interfered in many directions with the earlier
work of the palace: still the only serious alteration in its form was
the transposition of the prisons, formerly at the top of the palace to
the other side of the Rio del Palazzo; and the building of the Bridge of
Sighs, to connect them with the palace, by Antonio da Ponte. The
completion of this work brought the whole edifice into its present form;
with the exception of alterations indoors, partitions, and staircases
among the inner apartments, not worth noticing, and such barbarisms and
defacements as have been suffered within the last fifty years, by, I
suppose nearly every building of importance in Italy.

SECTION XXX. Now, therefore, we are at liberty to examine some of the
details of the Ducal Palace, without any doubt about their dates. I
shall not however, give any elaborate illustrations of them here,
because I could not do them justice on the scale of the page of this
volume, or by means of line engraving. I believe a new era is opening to
us in the art of illustration, [Footnote: See the last chapter of the
third volume, Stones of Venice.] and that I shall be able to give large
figures of the details of the Ducal Palace at a price which will enable
every person who is interested in the subject to possess them; so that
the cost and labor of multiplying illustrations here would be altogether
wasted. I shall therefore direct the reader's attention only to such
points of interest as can be explained in the text.

SECTION XXXI. First, then, looking back to the woodcut at the beginning
of this chapter, the reader will observe that, as the building was very
nearly square on the ground plan, a peculiar prominence and importance
were given to its angles, which rendered it necessary that they should
be enriched and softened by sculpture. I do not suppose that the fitness
of this arrangement will be questioned; but if the reader will take the
pains to glance over any series of engravings of church towers or other
four-square buildings in which great refinement of form has been
attained, he will at once observe how their effect depends on some
modification of the sharpness of the angle, either by groups of
buttresses, or by turrets and niches rich in sculpture. It is to be
noted also that this principle of breaking the angle is peculiarly
Gothic, arising partly out of the necessity of strengthening the flanks
of enormous buildings, where composed of imperfect materials, by
buttresses or pinnacles; partly out of the conditions of Gothic warfare,
which generally required a tower at the angle; partly out of the natural
dislike of the meagreness of effect in buildings which admitted large
surfaces of wall, if the angle were entirely unrelieved. The Ducal
Palace, in its acknowledgment of this principle, makes a more definite
concession to the Gothic spirit than any of the previous architecture of
Venice. No angle, up to the time of its erection, had been otherwise
decorated than by a narrow fluted pilaster of red marble, and the
sculpture was reserved always, as in Greek and Roman work, for the plane
surfaces of the building, with, as far as I recollect, two exceptions
only, both in St. Mark's; namely, the bold and grotesque gargoyle on its
north-west angle, and the angels which project from the four inner
angles under the main cupola; both of these arrangements being plainly
made under Lombardic influence. And if any other instances occur, which
I may have at present forgotten, I am very sure the Northern influence
will always be distinctly traceable in them.

SECTION XXXII. The Ducal Palace, however, accepts the principle in its
completeness, and throws the main decoration upon its angles. The
central window, which looks rich and important in the woodcut, was
entirely restored in the Renaissance time, as we have seen, under the
Doge Steno; so that we have no traces of its early treatment; and the
principal interest of the older palace is concentrated in the angle
sculpture, which is arranged in the following manner. The pillars of the
two bearing arcades are much enlarged in thickness at the angles, and
their capitals increased in depth, breadth, and fulness of subject;
above each capital, on the angle of the wall, a sculptural subject is
introduced, consisting, in the great lower arcade, of two or more
figures of the size of life; in the upper arcade, of a single angel
holding a scroll: above these angels rise the twisted pillars with their
crowning niches, already noticed in the account of parapets in the
seventh chapter; thus forming an unbroken line of decoration from the
ground to the top of the angle.

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