Page:A History of Architecture in All Countries Vol 2.djvu/381

Rh Bk. Yin. Ch. IV. VENICE. 365 its faults, and to extol that as beautiful, which without the adjunct of color they would have unanimously agreed in condemning. A better sjjecimen of the style, because erected as designed, and remaining nearly as erected, is the Ca d'Oro (Woodcut No. 793), built about 1350, or nearly contemporary with the ducal palace. It has no trace of the high roofs or aspiring tendencies of the Northern buildings of the same age, no boldly-marked buttresses in strong vertical lines, but, on the contrary, flat sky-lines and horizontal divisions pervade the design, and every part is ornamented with a fanciful richness far more characteristic of the luxurious refinement of the East than of the man- lier appreciation of the higher qualities of art which distinguished the contemporai-y erections on this side of the Alps. n ^ l*^', /^'^Jf^^y/ 793. Ch d'Oro, Venice. (From Cicognara.) The palaces known as the Foscari and Pisani are very similar in design to that of the Ca d'Oro, though less rich and less hap{)y in the distribution of the parts ; but tiine has restored to them that color which was an inherent part of the older design, and they are so beautiful and so interesting that it is hard to criticise even their too apparent defects as works of art. Most of the faults that strike us in the buildings of Venice arise from the defective knowledge which they betray of constructive principles. The Venetian architects had not been brought up in the hard school of jiractical experience, nor thoroughly grounded in construction, as the Northern architects Avere by the necessities of the large buildings Avhich they erected. On the contrary, they merely adopted details because they were pretty, and used them so as to be picturesque in domestic edifices, where conve-