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The ducal palace, like St Mark's, is a symbol and an epitome of the race which evolved it. Soon after the concentration at Rialto the doge Angelo Particiaco began an official residence for the head of the state. It was probably a small, strongly fortified castle; one of its massive angle-towers is now incorporated in St Mark's and serves as the treasury. During the earlier years of the republic the ducal palace was frequently destroyed and rebuilt. It was burnt in 976 and again inf 1106. At the close of the 12th century (1173-1179) Sebastian Ziani restored and enlarged the palace. Of his work some traces still remain in the richly sculptured bands built in at intervals along the 14th-century facade on the Rio, and part of the handsome larch-wood 'beams which; formed the loggia of the piazzetta facade, still visible on the inner wall of the present loggia. The present magnificent building was a slow. growth extending over three centuries and expanding gradually as the republic grew in riches.

The, palace as we now see it, was begun about 1300 by Doge Pietro Garadenigo who soon, after the closing of the great council gave its permanent form 'to the Venetian constitution. It is therefore in a sense, contemporaneous with the early manhood of the state. Gradenigo built the facade along the Rio. About 1309 the arcaded facade along the lagoon front was taken in hand, and set the design fir the whole of the external frontage of the palace. Towards the end of the 14th century, this facade, with its lower colonnade, upper loggia with handsome Gothic tracery, and the vast impending upper storey, which give to the whole building its striking appearance and audacious design, had been carried as far as the tenth column on the piazzetta side. At this point, perhaps out of regard for the remains of Ziani's palace, the, work seems to have been arrested for many years, but in 1424 the building was resumed and carried as far as the north-west, or judgment, angle, near St Mark's, thus completing the sea and piazzetta facades as we now see them. The great gateway, the Porta della Carta, was added in 1439-42 from designs by Bartholomeo Buono (or Bon), and his son. The block of buildings in the interior, connecting the Porta della Carta to the Rio wing, was added about 1462 by the doge Cristoforo Moro. In 1479 a fire consumed the earlier buildings along the Rio, and these were replaced (1480-1550) by the present Renaissance structure.

The two main facades, those towards the sea and the piazzetta, consist of a repetition of the same design, that which was begun in the early years of the 14th century. The name of the architect who began the work and thus fixed the design of the whole is not certainly known, but it must have been a man of an earlier generation than that of Filippo Calendario, who is often stated to have been the chief architect of the older portion. Calendario was an accomplice in the conspiracy of Marino Faliero, and was executed together with the doge in 1355. It appears probable that a Venetian architect and sculptor named Pietro Baseggio was the chief master builder in the first half of the 14th century. The design of these facades is very striking and unlike that of any other building in the world. It consists of two storeys with open colonnades, forming a long loggia on the ground and first floors, with seventeen arches on the front and eighteen on the other facade. Above this is a lofty third store, pierced with a few large windows, with pointed arches once filled with tracery, which is now lost. The whole surface of the ponderous upper storey is covered with a 'diaper pattern in slabs of creamy white Istrian stone and red Verona marble, giving a delicate rosy-orange hue to the building. Very beautiful sculpture, executed with an ivory-like minuteness of finish, is used to decorate the whole building wit wonderful profusion. At each of the three free angles is a large group immediately over the lower column. At the south-east angle is the “Drunkenness of Noah," at the south-west the “Fall of Man,” and at the north-west the “Judgment of Solomon!" Over each, at a much higher level, is a colossal figure of an archangel—Raphael, Michael and Gabriel.

The great internal court is surrounded with arcading. From the interior of the court access isg iven to the upper loggia by a very beautiful staircase of early Renaissance stylie, built in the middle of the 15th century by Antonio Rizzo. Two colossal statues of Neptune and Mars at the top of these stairs were executed by Iacopo Sansovino in 1554—hence the name “giants' staircase." Owing to a fire which gutted a. great part of the palace in 1574, the internal appearance of the rooms was completely changed, and the fine series of early Paduan and Venetian paintings which decorated the walls of the chief, rooms, was lost. At present the magnificent Council chambers for the different legislative bodies of the Venetian republic and the state apartments of the doges are richly decorated with gilt carving and panelling in the style of the later Renaissance. On the walls of the chief council chambers are a magnificent series of oil-paintings by Tintoretto and other less able Venetians—among them Tintoretto's masterpiece, “Bacchus and Ariadne,” and his enormous picture of Paradise, the largest oil-painting in the world.

Among the many Gothic churches of Venice the largest are the Franciscan church 'of Santa Maria. Gloriosa dei Frari (1250-1280) and the Dominican church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo (1260'°'1400). The Frari is remarkable for its fine choir-stalls and for the series of six eastern chapels which from outside give a very good example of Gothic brickwork, comparable with the even finer apse of the now desecrated church of San Gregorio. The church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo was the usual burying-place of the doges, and contains many 'noble mausoleums of various dates. Besides these two churches we may mention Santo Stefano, an interesting building of central Gothic, "the best ecclesiastical example, of it in Venice.” The apse is built over a canal. The west entrance is later than the rest, of the edifice and is of the richest Renaissance Gothic, a little earlier than the Porta della Carta.

But it is in the domestic architecture of Venice that we find the most striking and characteristic examples of Gothic. The introduction of that styled coincided with the consolidation of the Venetian constitution and the development of Venetian commerce both in the Levant and with England and Flanders. The wealth which thus accrued found architectural expression in those noble palaces, so characteristic of Venice, which line the Grand and smaller canals. They are so numerous that we cannot do more than call attention to one or two.

The most striking example is undoubtedly the Ca' d' Oro, so called from the profusion of gold employed on its facade. It was built for Marino Contarini in 1421, rather a late period in the development of the style.

Marino kept a minute entry of his expenses, a document of the highest value, not merely for the history of the building, but also for the light it throws on the private life of the great patricians who gave to Venice such noble examples of art. Contarini was to some extent his own architect. He had the assistance of Marco d'Amadeo, a master builder, and of Matteo Reverti, a Milanese sculptor, who were joined later on by Giovanni Buono and his son Bartolome. Other artists, of whom we know nothing else, such as Antonio Busetto, Antonio Foscolo, Gasparino Rosso, Giacomo da Como, Marco da Legno and others, were called in to help in evolving this masterpiece of decorated architecture, affording us an example of the way in which the ducal palace and other monuments of Venice grew out of the collaboration of numerous nameless artists. By the year 1431 the facade was nearly completed, and Contarini made a bargain with Martino and Giovanni Benzon for the marbles to cover what was yet unfinished. The facade is a triumph of graceful elegance; so light is the tracery, so rich the decoration, so successful the breach of symmetry which gives us a wing upon the left-hand side but none upon the right. But Contarini was not content to leave the marbles as they were. He desired to have the facade, of his house in colour. The contract for this work, signed with Master Zuan de Franza, conjures up a vision of the, Ca d' Oro ablaze with colour and gleaning with the gold ornamentation from which it took its name.

Other notable examples of this style are the Palazzo Ariani at San Raffaelle, with its handsome window in a design of intersecting circles; the beautiful window with the symbols of the four Evangelists in the spandrels, in the facade of a house, at San Stae; the row of three Giustinian palaces at S., Barnaba; the Palazzo Priuli at San Severo, with a remarkably graceful angle-window, where the columnar mullion carries down the angle of the