Capital of a Column in the Ducal Palace, Venice.
Arnolfo's Palazzo Vecchio, the Palazzo of the Commune at Siena, and the Palazzo Pubblico at Pistoja show the next step towards a less military style. There still remains much of the fortress, in the solidity and rigidity of the masonry below, and the battlemented lines above, but the tower is no longer a solid weapon of war; it becomes an airy ornamental shrine for a peaceful civic bell, that rings for the joys and sorrows of the people.
These buildings may stand as the fair examples of the work of the Masonic Guild for the thirteenth century; in the fourteenth and fifteenth the style changed gradually towards less rigid lines. The windows were widened and cusped, and the arches over the archlets of the windows became pointed; a gable with crockets placed above the windows still further lightened the effect, and emphasized the new Gothic influence. The ancient Palace of the Priors and Palazzo del Popolo, which stand close together at Todi, of which we give an illustration, show this progress in a very marked degree. There is just the difference between the two buildings that there lies between the palace of King Desiderius at S. Gemignano, and the Palazzo Vecchio of Florence. The Palazzo Pubblico, at Perugia, with its noble Ringhiera and Loggia, might be taken as the culminating point of Romanesque civil building. Its principal doorway is a masterpiece of Comacine work. The Masters have set their sign of the lion beneath the column, but both lion and pillar are secularized; instead of the ecclesiastic column, here is a square pilaster with niches containing graceful figures of the civic virtues—justice, mercy, fortitude, charity, etc. In the tympanum of the arch stand three bishops, and over the architrave two other lions on brackets mark the spring of the arch. The door is surrounded with course upon course of beautiful mouldings, arabesques, and spirals rich in the extreme. Though exceptionally beautiful, yet if one compares this Palazzo Pubblico of Perugia with other public edifices of its time in Italy, the similarities are such that one cannot deny that a single influence must have dominated them all.
In the Palazzo Pubblico at Udine, which was later, being built in the fifteenth century by Giovanni Fontana of Melide (Master of Palladio) and Matteo his son, we get the link between these Romanesque civil buildings and the Venetian Gothic. The upper windows have still the Lombard columns, but the little arches are more ornately cusped and gothicized. The colonnade forming the Ringhiera is formed of decidedly pointed arches. There is in this a marked affinity to the Venetian architecture, and its origin accounts for it. The Fontanas were much employed at Venice, and worked with the Lombardi, to whom Venice is indebted for so much of her beautiful Gothic civil architecture. In cinquecento times there was a great call on the Masonic Guild for palaces. The republics had begun to fade into principalities, wealth and aristocracy again got the upper hand. The great churches were already built, and so to employ the many great Masters of architecture and sculpture whose families had for generations beautified Italian cities, the dominant families in them vied with each other in palace building.
Doorway of the Municipal Palace at Perugia (1340).