There is a class of pictures in the Ducal Palace so numerous that we have not space to speak justly of them. They are those of which Rio says:—
"It was no doubt the passage of the Psalmist—Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam—which was so often repeated by the Venetians in the Crusades, which suggested to the Doges and naval commanders the idea of being represented in a kneeling attitude before the infant Christ or the Holy Virgin, in the pictures destined to transmit their names or the recollection of their exploits to future generations. This mode of pious commemoration, which offers the touching contrast of an humble attitude with great dignity or glory, continued in use during the whole of the sixteenth century, in spite of the paganism so universally triumphant elsewhere. After Giovanni Bellini and Catena, came the celebrated artists who adorned the second period of the Venetian school, and who also paid the tribute of their pencils to this interesting subject. It is on this account that pictures representing the Madonna seated, with a doge or a general kneeling before her, are so frequently to be met with in private collections, in the churches, and above all in the Ducal Palace, in which these allegorical compositions, intended to express the close alliance between Religion and the State, seem to have been purposely multiplied."
In no other place in all Venice does the atmosphere of the Middle Ages linger as it does in the Palazzo Ducale. The atmosphere of the days when the scroll in the hand of Venice enthroned bore this inscription, "Fortis, justa, trono furias, mare sub pede, pono" (Strong and just, I put the furies beneath my throne, and the sea beneath my foot). Emerging from this palace, with one's brain full of more thoughts than it can hold, it is restful to find a part of them so happily expressed as in these words of Taine:—
"We see here with surprise and delight oriental fancy grafting the full on the empty instead of the empty on the full. A colonnade of robust shafts bears a second and a lighter one decorated with ogives and with trefoils; while above this support, so frail, expands a massive wall of red and white marble, whose courses interlace each other in designs and reflect the light. Above, a cornice of open pyramids, pinnacles, spiracles, and festoons intersect the sky with its border, forming a marble vegetation bristling and blooming above the vermilion and pearly tones of the façade, reminding one of the luxuriant Asiatic or African cactus which on its native soil mingles its leafy poniards and purple petals.
"You enter, and immediately the eyes are filled with forms. Around two cisterns covered with sculptured bronze, four façades develop their statues and architectural details glowing with the freshness of the early Renaissance. There is nothing bare or cold; everything is decked with reliefs and figures, the pedantry of erudites and critics not having intervened, under the pretext of purity and correctness, to restrain a lively imagination and the craving for that which pleases the eye. People are not austere in Venice; they do not restrict themselves to the prescriptions of books; they do not make up their minds to go and yawn admiringly at a façade sanctioned by Vitruvius; they want an architectural work to absorb and delight the whole sentient being; they deck it with ornaments, columns, and statues; they render it luxurious and joyous. They place colossal pagans like Mars and Neptune on it, and biblical figures like Adam and Eve; the sculptors of the fifteenth century enliven it with their somewhat realistic and lank bodies, and those of the sixteenth with their animated and muscular forms. Rizzo and Sansovino here rear the precious marbles of their stairways, the delicate stuccoes and elegant caprices of their arabesques: armor and boughs, griffins and fawns; fantastic flowers and capering goats, a profusion of poetic plants and joyous, bounding animals. You mount these princely steps with a sort of timidity and respect, ashamed of the dull black coat you wear, reminding one by contrast of the embroidered silk gowns, the sweeping, pompous dalmatics, the Byzantine tiaras and brodekins, all that seigneurial magnificence for which these marble staircases were designed; and, at the top, to greet you, are two superb women, Power and Justice, and a doge receiving from them the sword of command and of battle.
Court of the Ducal Palace; Giants' Staircase.
"At the top of the staircase open the two halls, the government and state saloons, and both are lined with paintings; here Tintoretto, Veronese, Pordenone, Palma the younger, Titian, Bonifazio, and twenty others have covered with masterpieces the walls of which Palladia, Aspetti, Scamozzi, and Sansovino made the designs and ornaments. All the genius of the city at its brightest period assembled here to glorify the Republic in the erection of a memorial of its victories and an apotheosis of its grandeur. There is no similar trophy in the world: naval combats, ships with curved prows like swan's necks, galleys with crowded banks of oars, battlements discharging showers of arrows, floating standards amidst masts, a tumultuous strife of struggling and engulfed combatants, crowds of Illyrians, Saracens, and Greeks, naked bodies bronzed by the sun and deformed by contests, stuffs of gold, damascene armor, silks starred with pearls, all the strange medley of that heroic, luxurious display which transpires in Venetian history from Zara to Damietta, and from Padua to the Dardanelles; here and there, grand nudities of allegorical goddesses; in the triangles the 'Virtues' of Pordenone, a species of colossal virago with herculean, sanguine, and choleric body; throughout, a display of virile strength, active energy, sensual gayety, and, preparing the way for this bewildering procession, the grandest of modern paintings, a 'Paradise' by Tintoretto, eighty feet long by twenty wide, with six hundred figures whirling about in a ruddy illumination, as if from the glowing flames of a vast conflagration."