Page:Architectural Review and American Builders' Journal, Volume 1, 1869.djvu/199

 1868.] Descriptions. 169 DESCRIPTIONS. DESIGN FOR A CITY STORE. Style: Venetian Gothic. A GLANCE at the design for a city store-front, which we in this num- ber present to our readers, will at once indicate that it is intended for a place of extensive traffic, either in a large whole- sale business, or in retailing the richer- patterned and more costly goods, its applicability to either being, of course, dependent on the style of the internal arrangement of the building. The heavy outlay, consequent upon the erection of such a structure, would put the design beyond the reach, and even beyond the requirements, of any busi- ness conducted in a comparatively ordi- nary manner; and it may therefore, be, with propriety, styled A First-Class Elevation. We have chosen for the Store-front the Gothic, or, rather, what is termed, the Venetian-Gothic style, with its low arched heads over the doors and win- dows ; somewhat resembling the Tu- dor Arches ; and the broken-outline dressings, around the doors and win- dows ; and also what may be termed the " story-posts," to use the practical work- men's phrase ; or, as more technically expressed in Gothic architecture, " clus- tered columns." This combination of features is peculiar to the Veneto-Gothic style. During the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, the architecture of Venice appears, from the examples still to be seen, throughout "That glorious city in the sea — " that ancient place, round which, through the dim vista of past ages, a halo of poetry and romantic association still lingers — to have been formed on the model of a mixture of Byzantine and Arabic, the workmen having been Byzan- tine, but the designers and masters Arabians. The examples we speak of are the three noble churches of Torcello, Murano, and the greater part of St. Mark's, together with about ten or twelve fragments of ruined palaces. To this succeeded a transitionary pe- riod in which the style became more markedly Arabian in character, — with the shafts more slender, and the arches pointed instead of round. This is only observable in private dwelling-houses, and not in their churches, as they would naturally have been slow and reluctant to adopt any of the characteristics of the mosque. The date of this particular style can be fixed at about A. D. 1180, by the elevation of the granite shafts of the Piazetta, the capitals of which are the most marked specimens of this transitional style. This was trans- formed gradually into the Gothic style, formed from the Venetian- Arab, by the influence of the Dominicans and Franciscans, who, introduced, about the thirteenth century, from the con- tinent, their morality and their style of architecture, already a Gothic, and which had a rapid influence over the Venetian-Arabian school, en- grafting upon the Arab forms the most novel features of the Franciscan, its traceries. The progress made by this feeling in favor of the Gothic, was gradual : and, until it had decidedly