Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 4.djvu/436

428 for guns, defends two bastions, or more properly towers, which stand at a certain distance on each side thereof, every part being completed with so much judgment, the whole being so magnificent and costly a work, that none need suppose it possible for the future to produce a more beautiful or more admirable performance, as it is certain that the earliest ages have none more ably executed, or any that could surpass the same.

Some few years later San Michele founded and partially constructed another gate in Verona, commonly called that of the Palio, and which is in no wise inferior to that already mentioned, nay, it is perhaps even more beautiful, being large, majestic, and admirably contrived at all points: in these two gates the Venetian Signori may of a truth be said to have equalled, by means of this architect’s genius, the buildings and structures of the ancient Romans.

The gate of the Palio is externally of the Doric order, with columns of immense height and girth, which are fluted or striated in the manner proper to that order; and. these columns, of which there are in all eight, are placed in pairs: four of them serve to flank the door, and on each side there is an escutcheon of the arms of the city magistrates between column and column; the remaining four, placed in like manner two and two, make a finish to the angles of the gate, the front of which is exceedingly wide and is entirely of rustic work, deeply cut, and having each projection not rough but polished, the whole enriched moreover with decorations of great beauty; the passage or open space of the gate retaining the quadrangular form, but of an architecture which is new, fanciful, and very beautiful. Over this there is an exceedingly rich Doric cornice with all its appurtenances; and above that there was to be placed, as we see by the model, a pediment with the requisite ornaments, which was to serve as a parapet to the artillery, this gate being intended like the other to be used as an embrasure or cavalier also: