Page:EB1911 - Volume 27.djvu/1025

 the state grew in wealth and importance the church grew with it. About the year 1063 the Doge Contarini resolved to remodel St Mark’s. There can be no doubt that Byzantine artists had a large share in the work, but it is equally certain that Lombard workmen were employed along with the Orientals, and thus St Mark’s became, as it were, a workshop in which two styles, Byzantine and Lombard, met and were fused together, giving birth to a new style, peculiar to the district, which may fairly be called Veneto-Byzantine.

Fine examples of Venetian Byzantine palaces–at least of the façades are still to be seen on the Grand Canal and in some of the small canals. The interiors have been modified past recognition of their original disposition. The Byzantine palace seems to have had twin angle-towers—gemihas angular turres—such as those of the Ca’ Molin on the Riva degli Schiavoni, where Petrarch lived. The restored (1880) Fondaco dei Turchi (13th century), now the Museo Civico, also has two angle-towers. The façades presented continuous colonnades on each floor with semicircular high stilted arches, leaving a very small amount of wall space. The buildings were usually battlemented in fantastic form. A good specimen may be seen in Lazzaro Sebastiani’s picture of the piazzetta, in the Museo Civico. There on the right we see the handsome building of the old bakery, occupying the site of the present library; it has two arcades of Saracenic arches and a fine row of battlements. Other specimens still in existence are the municipal buildings, Palazzo Loredan and Palazzo Farsetti—if, indeed, these are not to be considered rather as Romanesque—and the splendid Ca’ da Mosto, all on the Grand Canal. The richest ornamentation was applied to the arches and string courses, while plaques of sculpture, roundels and coats of arms adorned the façades. The remains of a Byzantine façade now almost entirely built into a wall in the Rio di Ca’ Foscari offer us excellent illustration of this decorative work.

Gothic Architecture.-Venetian Gothic, both ecclesiastical and domestic, shares most of the characteristics of north Italian Gothic generally, though in domestic architecture it displays one peculiarity which we shall presently note. The material, brick and terra-cotta, is the determining, cause of the characteristics of north Italian Gothic.