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 CHAPTER IX

PALACE ARCHITECTURE OF THE RENAISSANCE IN NORTH ITALY

The palace architecture of the Renaissance in north Italy which has the most marked local character is that of Venice. We have already, in the preceding chapter, noticed several buildings here by Sansovino, but these belong to the later Roman Renaissance style, and are thus not so distinctly Venetian. Several civic monuments, however, and many houses of the Grand Canal and elsewhere, exhibit the peculiar Venetian type. Among the earliest and most noteworthy of these is the east side of the Court of the Ducal Palace by the architect Antonio Riccio of Verona. This richly ornamental scheme is wrought upon a foundation of earlier work to which the architect was obliged to conform, and this appears to have given rise to the irregular magnitudes and spacings of the openings of the upper stories, which are so noticeable, and are in marked contrast with the symmetrical regularity of Renaissance design in general. The long façade is in two walled stories above a basement in two stages of open arcading, with the so-called giant's stairway giving access to the upper arcade. The ground story has splayed round arches on piers of corresponding section adorned with pilasters of neo-classic form, while the stage above has a pointed arcade on compound shafted supports of mediæval Venetian character (Plate VI). The upper stories are marked by entablatures, and the round-arched windows are flanked by pilasters reaching, in the principal story, to the arch impost, and then stilted to carry curved pediments worked in relief against the entablature that crowns this story. The top story is divided into two parts of nearly equal length, but of different height, and different design. The part extending from the middle to the sea side of the court is the lower, and has its windows flanked by pilasters reaching to the crowning 154