CHAPTER VII.
GOTHIC PALACES.
§ I. The buildings out of the remnants of which we have endeavored to recover some conception of the appearance of Venice during the Byzantine period, contribute hardly anything at this day to the effect of the streets of the city. They are too few and too much defaced to attract the eye or influence the feelings. The charm which Venice still possesses, and which for the last fifty years has rendered it the favorite haunt of all the painters of picturesque subject, is owing to the effect of the palaces belonging to the period we have now to examine, mingled with those of the Renaissance.
This effect is produced in two different ways. The Renaissance palaces are not more picturesque in themselves than the club-houses of Pall Mall; but they become delightful by the contrast of their severity and refinement with the rich and rude confusion of the sea life beneath them, and of their white and solid masonry with the green waves. Remove from beneath them the orange sails of the fishing boats, the black gliding of the gondolas, the cumbered decks and rough crews of the barges of traffic, and the fretfulness of the green water along their foundations, and the Renaissance palaces possess no more interest than those of London or Paris. But the Gothic palaces are picturesque in themselves, and wield over us an independent power. Sea and sky, and every other accessory might be taken away from them, and still they would be beautiful and strange. They are not less striking in the loneliest streets of Padua and Vicenza (where many were built during the period of the Venetian authority in those cities) than in the most crowded thoroughfares of Venice itself; and if they could be transported into the midst of London, they would still not altogether lose their power over the feelings.
§ II. The best proof of this is in the perpetual attractiveness of all pictures, however poor in skill, which have taken for their subject the principal of these Gothic buildings, the Ducal Palace. In spite of all architectural theories and teachings, the paintings of this building are always felt to be delightful; we cannot be wearied by them, though often sorely tried; but we are not put to the same trial in the case of the palaces of the Renaissance. They are never drawn singly, or as the principal subject, nor can they be. The building which faces the Ducal Palace on the opposite side of the Piazzetta is celebrated among architects, but it is not familiar to our eyes; it is painted only incidentally, for the completion, not the subject, of a Venetian scene; and even the Renaissance arcades of St. Mark’s Place, though frequently painted, are always treated as a mere avenue to its Byzantine church and colossal tower. And the Ducal Palace itself owes the peculiar charm which we have hitherto felt, not so much to its greater size as compared with other Gothic buildings, or nobler design (for it never yet has been rightly drawn), as to its comparative isolation. The other Gothic structures are as much injured by the continual juxtaposition of the Renaissance palaces, as the latter are aided by it; they exhaust their own life by breathing it into the Renaissance coldness: but the Ducal Palace stands comparatively alone, and fully expresses the Gothic power.
| Fig. XXI. |
§ III. And it is just that it should be so seen, for it is the original of nearly all the rest. It is not the elaborate and more studied developement of a national style, but the great and sudden invention of one man, instantly forming a national style, and becoming the model for the imitation of every architect in Venice for upwards of a century. It was the determination of this one fact which occupied me the greater part of the time I spent in Venice. It had always appeared to me most strange that there should be in no part of the city any incipient or imperfect types of the form of the Ducal Palace; it was difficult to believe that so mighty a building had been the conception of one man, not only in disposition and detail, but in style; and yet impossible, had it been otherwise, but that some early examples of approximate Gothic form must exist. There is not one. The palaces built between the final cessation of the Byzantine style, about 1300, and the date of the Ducal Palace (1320-1350), are all completely distinct in character, so distinct that I at first intended the account of them to form a separate section of this volume; and there is literally no transitional form between them and the perfection of the Ducal Palace. Every Gothic building in Venice which resembles the latter is a copy of it. I do not mean that there was no Gothic in Venice before the Ducal Palace, but that the mode of its application to domestic architecture had not been determined. The real root of the Ducal Palace is the apse of the church of the Frari. The traceries of that apse, though earlier and ruder in workmanship, are nearly the same in mouldings, and precisely the same in treatment (especially in the placing of the lions’ heads), as those of the great Ducal Arcade; and the originality of thought in the architect of the Ducal Palace consists in his having adapted those traceries, in a more highly developed and finished form, to civil uses. In the apse of the church they form narrow and tall window lights, somewhat more massive than those of Northern Gothic, but similar in application: the thing to be done was to adapt these traceries to the forms of domestic building necessitated by national usage. The early palaces consisted, as we have seen, of arcades sustaining walls faced with marble, rather broad and long than elevated. This form was kept for the Ducal Palace; but instead of round arches from shaft to shaft, the Frari traceries were substituted, with two essential modifications. Besides being enormously increased in scale and thickness, that they might better bear the superincumbent weight, the quatrefoil, which in the Frari windows is above the arch, as at a, [Fig. XXI.], on previous page, was, in the Ducal Palace, put between the arches, as at b; the main reason for this alteration being that the bearing power of the arches, which was now to be trusted with the weight of a wall forty feet high,[75] was thus thrown between the quatrefoils, instead of under them, and thereby applied at far better advantage. And, in the second place, the joints of the masonry were changed. In the Frari (as often also in St. John and St. Paul’s) the tracery is formed of two simple cross bars or slabs of stone, pierced into the requisite forms, and separated by a horizontal joint, just on a level with the lowest cusp of the quatrefoils, as seen in [Fig. XXI.], a. But at the Ducal Palace the horizontal joint is in the centre of the quatrefoils, and two others are introduced beneath it at right angles to the run of the mouldings, as seen in [Fig. XXI.], b.[76] The Ducal Palace builder was sternly resolute in carrying out this rule of masonry. In the traceries of the large upper windows, where the cusps are cut through as in the quatrefoil [Fig. XXII.], the lower cusp is left partly solid, as at a, merely that the joint a b may have its right place and direction.
| Fig. XXII. |