THE BROCHURE SERIES
The Ducal Palace: Venice
Types of Italian Garden Fountains
SEPTEMBER, 1900

PLATE LXVII

COURT OF THE DUCAL PALACE

THE DUCAL PALACE: VENICE

"Considered as the principal representation of the Venetian school of architecture, the Ducal Palace is the Parthenon of Venice," wrote Ruskin. To know its history would be to know the entire history of the Republic, for it was not alone the residence of her doges, but at different epochs her senate-house, her court of justice, a prison, and even a place of execution. Combining thus in one structure, as it does, the greatest architectural and the greatest historical importance, there is, perhaps, no more interesting monument now existing in the world.

In his suggestive work upon Italy, Taine has vividly described the effect of a first sight of the Ducal Palace. "Like a magnificent jewel in a brilliant setting, it effaces its surroundings," he writes. "Never has like architecture been seen. All here is novel. You feel yourself drawn out of the conventional; you realize that there is an entire world outside the Classic or Gothic forms which we impose on ourselves and endlessly repeat; that human invention is illimitable, and that, like nature, it may break all the rules, and produce a perfect work after a model opposed in every particular to that to which we are instructed to conform. Every habit of the eye is reversed; and, with surprise and delight, we here see oriental fancy grafting the full on the empty instead of the empty on the full. A colonnade of robust shafts bears a second and lighter one decorated with ogives and trefoils, while upon this frail support expands a massive wall of red and white marble, whose courses interlace in designs and reflect the light. Above, a cornice of open pyramids, pinnacles, spiracles and festoons intersects the sky with its border,—a marble vegetation bristling and blooming above the vermilion and pearly tones of the façade.

"You enter the courtyard, and immediately your eyes are filled with a new richness. Nothing is bare or cold. Erudite and critical pedantry has not here intervened, under the pretext of purity and correctness, to restrain lively imagination and the craving for visual enjoyment. The builders of Venice were not austere; they did not restrict themselves to the prescriptions of books; they did not make up their minds to yawn admiringly at a façade which had been sanctioned by Vitruvious; they wanted an architectural work to delight their whole sentient being. They decked it with ornaments, columns and statues, they rendered it luxurious and joyous. They placed colossal pagans like Mars and Neptune on it, and flanked them with biblical figures like Adam and Eve; the sculptors of the fifteenth century enlivened it with their lank realistic effigies, and